MAPS OF THE UNKNOWN: Graveyards of the Mammoth

From The Unexplained: A Sourcebook of Strange Phenomena, by William R. Corliss. Courtesy Bantam Books, 1976.

And more mammoth mayhem in this illustration compiled by Corliss in Scientific Anomalies and Other Provocative Phenomena, courtesy the Sourcebook Project, 2003.

COSMIC DEBRIS: All the Saucers Fit to Print

A goldmine of flying saucer titles are listed in this ad from the December 1958 issue of Flying Saucers: The Magazine of Space Conquest.

THE SENSE AND NONSENSE OF PROPHECY by Eileen J. Garrett

An eminently readable guide to spiritualists, mediums, fortune tellers, and other purveyors of would-be prophecy! Garrett was a titan of the field herself, an interesting woman who "attributed her mediumship not to spirits but to the activity of a 'magnetic field'" or some other scientifically measurable influence. Chapter Three is an especially enjoyable rundown on psychic fakery featuring a composite "Madame Zola" with whom Garrett skillfully (and not without sympathy) illustrates both the mechanical aspects of fortune telling as well as the often ignored mental/emotional state of the fortune tellers, who often believe in their own "gifts" even as they deliberately defraud their marks. Garrett's writing is warm without being sappy or credulous, with following chapters delivering the same scoop on crystal balls, tarot, palmistry, and so on.

It's worth noting that Garrett was always researching and developing her theories on ESP and mediumship and evolved her positions over time:

Garrett wrote "In all my years' professional mediumship I have had no "sign", "test" or slightest evidence to make me believe I have contacted another world." She considered that her trance controls were personalities from her subconscious and admitted to the parapsychologist Peter Underwood, "I do not believe in individual survival after death".

Almost a decade after her death John G. Fuller wrote a book on her supposed contact with deceased airman Herbert Carmichael Irwin back in 1930. Despite statements against an afterlife (such as quoted above) this story seems to be her most lasting influence some 50 years after her passing, which does little justice to her complex personality.

A Berkeley Medallion Book, 1968 (original pub. 1950)

MAPS OF THE UNKNOWN: The Interrupted Journey

The Hill's terrestrial route on that fateful night, and Betty's purported star map.

From The Interrupted Journey by John G. Fuller. Courtesy Berkeley Medallion Books, 1966.

COSMIC DEBRIS: The ABSM Club of America

A classic piece of Bigfoot history reprinted from Roger Patterson's Do Abominable Snowmen of America Really Exist? with appropriate disclaimers, in The Bigfoot Film Controversy by Christopher Murphy. Courtesy Hancock House, 2005 (original pub. 1966).

THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE CALENDAR: May + June 1975

 

After a month of chasing tic tacs and little green wheels, we're back! May and June give us some suitably ominous events with the mysterious loss of the USS Scorpion off the Azores and the (likely explicable) sighting of a UFO by astronaut Jim McDivitt during Gemini 4. Strange days indeed.

Lawrence David Kusche, 1974