The Weird Historian - Best of Coast to Coast AM - 6/25/24

from the Man Upstairs. Artsman's work has also appeared in Mental Floss, Bizarre and other publications, and he has been a featured speaker at various events including Explorer Mars, Humans to Mars Summit in Washington, d C. The Cody Island Congress of Curious People, New York's Comic Con, the Exeter UFO Festival, and the Brooklyn Historical Society. Some of his books include The Big Book of Mars, The Bomb Ahead of Oliver Cromwell, a memoir Chasing Ghosts, and We Are

Not Alone. Mark, Welcome back to the program. Have you been good?

giants that we've ever known. So I was fascinated by him, and I saw the movie The Elephant Man, probably at too young of an age, and that really stuck with me. It's a pretty amazing movie, The Life of Joseph Merrick, so that that also kind of, I think, really pulled me into the things, all things strange and bizarre.

the charge to have Charles the First beheaded. So that put an end to the monarchy in sixteen forty nine, and Cromwell took over, and then he died in sixteen fifty eight and he was embalmed and then buried in Westminster Abbey, and then his son took over, but then he abdicated the Lord Protector Lord Protectorate, and Charles the Second resumed the monarchy. That's why we have a monarchy against today, and that's why we have Charles the Third now.

But he was pretty angry about his dad being beheaded, so he exumed the body of Oliver Cromwell and he hanged it posthumously, and then he beheaded that embald head and he put it the top Withyminster Hall on a spike to deter anyone else from trying to commit regicide.

And it stayed there for twenty five years, and then eventually a storm came and broke that steak in half, and it fell to the ground and someone picked it up and took it home, and the head then traveled around, passing through different hands for another two hundred and seventy five years until it was finally reburied in nineteen sixty.

So the head traveled for three hundred years, which just I find to be an amazing story that some balm hedge just being passed around and shown the people, and people are studying it and questioning whether or not it's authentic. And so I wrote that whole story, covering the three hundred years of it, of its post life travels, and all told from the perspective of Cromwell's head.

with Oliver Cromwell. So it retained a few features. But yeah, I mean it was it didn't look great, but you know, you could still see that was the head of a former world leader today. So it's buried at Sydney Sussex College and Cambridge and the Anti Chapel there, but it's not known exactly where. So there's a plaque within the Anti Chapel that says that the head is buried within that space, but no one knows the exact positioning.

you know, from years in the past. So I found this story from nineteen twenty one of a religious leader who was running a school in Illinois, and his name was Wilburt Glenn Beliva, and he was preaching at least for ten years in this school system that the earth was flat. And this was the thousands of grade schoolers and high schoolers, and he was just convinced that this was the way, and he thought it was completely flat.

I mean, this is, you know, like like all the flat Earthers, I think pretty much ascribed to the same beliefs. It was, you know, flat, the north poles in the center, there's no South pole, and then there's just a wall of ice that kind of prevents sailors from falling off at the rim of the Earth, that they go too far, kind of like the Antarctic going all around the Earth. And to me, it sounds like the Game of Thrones

wall of ice, you know, the night Watch. But this was what the students were taught, and they were told that the flat Earth remained stationary in space, was just sitting there, and the Sun is revolving around us in sort of a spiral fashion, and that the Sun is opposed to being about ninety three million miles away as we know now, he said, the Sun was more like just a few miles away, not that far at all, And in terms of its size, it was much smaller,

considerably smaller than we know it to be. So again, just taking perspective from a different perspective. On perspective, I guess you could say.

flying saucers. That's when that term was coined. So the book really covers off on the history of UFOs and

were human experience, mostly beginning with the forties. It does dip back into some thoughts about ancient history, but mostly starting with like that era of the forties with the Kenneth Arnold's flying saucers, the food fighters of the earlier forties in World War Two, and then gets into just different eras you know, the nineteen fifties you had the contact Ese, this group of people that believed that they were in contact with different people from space, mainly mostly Nusians,

but people from other plants in the Solar system as well. I'm kind of preaching a message of peace and concern

about the atomication we had entered into. And then you get into more abductions in the sixties and seventies and continuing into the eighties of course and even today, and then so covers up all these different stories, but also takes a scientific perspective on the idea of extraterrestrial life and pursuits to discover extraterrestrial life, and then gets into more of the recent findings, particularly in the last you know, twenty twenty five years or so, all the news that's

been out lately with the tic tac UFOs and these different science from Navy pilots. So it covers a really broad range of the UFO experience.

were going on on Mars. He's subscribing to people, and so in nineteen twenty six, Mars was in opposition to Earth, which means it was its closest point in its orbit about thirty five million miles. So he decided to try to send a telegram to the Martians. He worked us out with Umar Raru that their Martian scientists would be

ready to receive the message from Earth. And so he worked with the Rugby Radio Tower in London, which was the world's tallest, most powerful radio tower in the world at that time, and they were connected with the Post Office, so the Post Office charged him their long distance rates, which I think was kind of funny, and I think they were able to promote that idea to get pressed

about what they were doing. And he sent this message to Mars and fully expected a response, and this was covered by newspapers around the world like this was ended up being a pretty big story, and of course he didn't get any message back, and he tried it again two years later because Mars was not positioned about every two years or so. So he tried it again and

of course again received nothing in response. And he said that umar Aru said that the Martian scientists were laughing at us because we were unable to received their messages, because we were not advanced enough to get the Martian messages back. So it was our fault that we weren't getting from the Martians.

He was actually based in the LA area, and he was a saucer club and had met some of them at one of the conventions, and of course he said they looked just like earthlings. And they urged him to run on the Space ticket. And he had had all these, you know, wonderful promises. I mean the kinds of things that you'd want any candidate to promise, right, So he he promised unlimited education for everybody, better housing and highways, better jobs, better wages. You know. He said that every

man would be a rich man tomorrow. And he had this idea of a world up tomorrow today in utopia now. And he had this I have it on my website. It's also in the book We Are Not Alone. This amazing ad that random newspaper American needs a Space age president, and it goes through these wonderful promises he has that the Space people will help him bring to life. As of course, you know that that didn't really go anywhere. He eventually fell off of a ticket and he backed out.

He didn't have enough support, but he did end up he said the Space people urged him to back Kennedy, which I think is you know, was nice because of course Kennedy did get the space program going and obviously got to the Moon. So you know, in the end, you know, we got we got somewhere with space with Gabriel Green support of Kennedy.

And again this was this was about three years before the first Zuppelin appeared, you know, and several years before obviously the Wright brothers had their first flight. That wasn't until nineteen oh three. So really the only thing flying was with hot air balloons at that time, and they wore people kind of working on some rudimentary aircraft at that time, but nothing that was like it was just gonna be traveling the sky, you know, calmly, seemingly.

around April or May of eighteen ninety seven. People were just seeing these things all over the country, and no one really had an explanation for where they came from or who they were. And this was before we had the language of like UFOs or flying saucers any of that stuff. So people were just describing as these weird airships. And there was one really particularly interesting case in Texas and a werea Texas where one of them crashed.

I know, we just talked about that case in nineteen twenty six, but this has been going on since the about eighteen seventy seven when Giovanni Schiaparelli, and Italian astronomer, thought that he saw line, he saw lines on Mars, and they were misinterpreted as canals. He called them canale, which is channeled. They got misinterpreted canals, and you have people saying that, oh my god, there's these giant Martians building canals all across Mars. They must be brilliant engineers.

So the idea of martians was becoming more and more prevalence and written about in the newspapers and discussed by, you know, legitimate scientists. So this idea that maybe a Martian had piloted one of these airships and crash didn't didn't seem that crazy. This was stuff that was being

talked about quite a bit at that time. Of course, a lot of this was ended up being told later by a historian who lived through this, like in nineteen seventy she came out said all this stuff was just written up by the local paper to kind of drum up tourism and some you know, economic benefits for the city because it was just a small town in Texas. But a lot of people believe that the Martian is still buried there today. So it's a pretty fascinating case.

What I love about that is it's exactly fifty years before Roswell that you have this case of the UFO crashing and the town then having this economic boom around that whole story. And that's like a small microcosts before rosweld is and became in nineteen forty seven.