Brad Steiger dons his alter ego Eric Norman and invites you to enter the doorway to the strange and discover some WEIRD UNSOLVED MYSTERIES! Presented with a verve and panache that rises above his Popular Library fare, this volume is a tidy little collection of themed mysteries, with a great table of contents courtesy Award Books - ol' Popular Library never bothered with that! Presentation counts, and even though this is the usual remixed slush pile from Steiger, it somehow seems fresh and intriguing, even as the thought starts to tickle the back of our brains, now where have I read this before?
Chapter one, for example, opens with missing child Tommy Bowman, who disappeared on a family hike in 1953. Steiger intones mysterious happenings of a trans-dimensional nature, though the truth seems far more prosaic, and sadder too, as Bowman likely was an unnamed victim of serial killer Mack Ray Edwards. Steiger will reuse this case, and pretty much this entire chapter, in his Strange Disappearances in 1972, just jiggling some words around. The missing Chinese army, the fictional Charles Ashmore, they may have all disappeared (or not) but they reappear in these pages over and over. A chapter on sea serpents follows, with many vintage 1800s case reports that buddy Warren Smith would paste into his Strange Secrets of the Loch Ness Monster in 1976, and some hoax accounts of the Lake Vorota monster of Siberia - which, to be clear, is a "real" unknown creature, with sighting reports that continue to this day. However, Steiger's claims of the monster devouring dogs and elk and an "undetermined" number of people are classic ballyhoo, adding just a little spice to a story to stretch it that much further. He also misspells the location as "Vororta" - go figure.
Next are ghost ships galore, and as we might expect the crew of the Ellen Austin performs their usual dramatic disappearing act. Various vessels are lost in the Bermuda Triangle before we move on to some classic spontaneous human combustion, and then unearth some mysterious artifacts like the Kensington Runestone. Steiger also gallantly defends James Churchward and his Mu fantasy against the snobby "sophisticates" with some cutting edge developments by botanist Dr. Albert C. Smith, who found "an overwhelming affinity" between Fijian and New Guinea flowers, which Steiger says is proof of an ancient landmass stretching across the ocean. Balkan pyramids and super civilizations are another mystery that lingers in the present day.
Steiger's penultimate chapter is a knockout on monsters of all shapes and sizes. Strange sightings from South America would be reused by Warren Smith for Lost Cities of the Ancients - Unearthed! in 1976. Nice selection here by Brad. His final chapter is on fairy folk with a sidebar into their possible UFO connection. Charmingly, Steiger posits the alien babe who made it with Antonio Villas-Boas as a possible fairy queen! I like it. We also get a credulous bit on the Cottingley Fairies and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, with technical arguments about the (im)possibility of hoaxing that sound similar to those marshaled for certain other mysterious creatures. Steiger ends on a high note though when he offers us a passport to Magonia, and ponders the "kernel of reality that may lie at the core of centuries of myth and legend." Bravo to Brad for this clean delivery of some old reliables. It must have paid the rent!
Award Books, 1969
Tight work!
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