"MONSTER" HUNTING by Ivan T. Sanderson

This piece about North American lake monsters by Ivan T. Sanderson spends a good amount of space on the Loch Ness Monster and Tim Dinsdale, for purposes of context and word count.

Otherwise, Sanderson plucks out some interesting midcentury monster sightings such as the Black River Monster of Lyons Falls, NY (nicknamed Lyonesse, natch), and the (relatively) giant lizard/frog/whatsit of New Hamburg, Ontario, estimated at 50 pounds of unknown ferocity. Big shots like Champ and the Lake Iliamna Monster round out the roster.

Dig the ads for a genuine imported switch blade and a PI badge right next to each other ... if the cops want to hassle you about your pocket knife, just flash your badge at 'em!

Also available to read and download at archive dot org.

Courtesy Saga magazine, Vol. 33 - No. 4, January 1967.

ARCHIVAL UPDATES: THE DEVIL'S SEA

The psychic survey of The Devil's Sea by Elizabeth Nichols is now available to read and download at archive dot org. Featuring the ESPer visions of Otto Binder, Irene Hughes, Ted "PK Man Owens," and others, alongside classic Triangle terror tales ...

Courtesy Award Books, 1975.

MAN IS THE PREY by James Clarke

Danger from above, danger from below, danger from every living thing ... for our final entry of the year author James Clarke lays down the law: MAN IS THE PREY!

A beefy book with a simple concept: animals that kill people. All of 'em, all over the world, but especially Africa as that was Clarke's remit. Clarke horrifies with tales of killer beasts, but he also equivocates when necessary. Consider his thoughts on the gila monster, a controversial "man killer" in the literature:

A number of people who ridicule the idea of the gila monster's [bite] being lethal to man claim that those who died after its bite were all alcoholic or sick. Curiously it seems a great many of them were, but then if an alcoholic is knocked down by a bus did the bus kill him or did the alcohol?

The "deadly" aspect of an animal may be variable, and down to circumstance. Is the elephant more dangerous than the lion, than the hippo, than the croc? Do raw numbers of victims tell it all, and do we even know the true numbers? Does any of that matter when you're the one getting chomped? 

Above, the original hardcover edition with a back cover cameo from a chacma baboon. Clarke's careful treading elevates his book above a simple chronicle of misery and helps us think about our place in nature, as a part of nature despite our best efforts. Owing to its era, much of the color comes from big game hunters and safari tales. Goodreads reviewer Brett Dulle has an insightful review which helps put certain parts of the book in context:

The book has two clear biases:

1. The author is an ex-pat living in South Africa and as a result the book is more focused on African wildlife than other countries dangerous animals. For example, his chapter on crocodiles is almost exclusively about the Nile crocodile. It's hard to criticize him for this because it is obviously much easier to write about what you have a personal experience with and these firsthand accounts are the most interesting parts of the book.

2. The author has a strong interest in big game hunting. My estimate is that over half of the information in the book comes from big game hunter's memoirs or conversations with big game hunters. This effects the coverage of different animals. The crocodile, an animal the author admits is probably the most voracious man-eater, gets 10 pages while the elephant gets 20 pages of coverage. As the book moves away from the big game animals, it feels more like he's simply listing off facts about these animals and the book starts to drag. Again, it's hard to complain since the stories of the big game hunters are usually quite exciting.

These foundational biases aside, the author also takes sides with some of the animals. Bears are depicted as practically harmless while wolves are ravenous hellhounds that, according to a story he reprints, almost ate an entire village in one night.

Another example of Clarke's personal views coming through is his treatment of the killer whale. Despite no real hard data about orcas eating or killing humans, he takes it as read from anecdote and reputation that the fearsome predator is a known, guaranteed killer. After all, no less an authority than the US Navy says that orcas "will attack human beings at every opportunity." And would you want to test that out yourself?

James Frederick Clarke (1934-)

The final chapter details the most dangerous animal to man: himself. The second to last chapter covers insects and arachnids, and delves into disease and famine - we know the mosquito is one of the deadliest creatures on earth, due to its transmission of a multitude of diseases. Bees and wasps can kill through swarming by the thousands or from one single sting on someone unlucky enough to be allergic. How does this stack up against a tiger's fangs or a shark's jaws? How much does public health and policy factor into a focus on deadly animals? It's not so easy as a top ten list but the journey is rewarding.

That ol' showman Ivan T. Sanderson shows up in Clarke's bibliography with a book on elephants, The Dynasty of Abu. Famous tiger man Jim Corbett features as well ... of course! It wouldn't be much of a book on killer animals without the hunter who bagged the Man-Eaters of Kumaon among many others!

More of man against nature ...

Lions, tigers, bears ... sharks, snakes, and things that sting! Killers from legend and in the laboratory, who kill for food, for self defense, or just for the hell of it! Clarke catalogs them all, and we're all the better for it! Man is the Prey is well worth picking up even today, as both a snapshot of an era and a thoughtful, expansive exploration of its subject. Grrr, hisss, ahhh!

Panther Books edition

Another hardcover, with a goofy snapshot!

Clarke's excellent text is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Pocket Books, 1970 (original pub. 1969)

GHOSTS, GHOULS, AND OTHER PECULIAR PEOPLE by Brad Steiger

Here's a treat: one of Brad Steiger's very first Fortean collections, before he settled into his STRANGE series for Popular Library. Dig that Fred, he'll never leave you! Dig too that blurb from bullshit artist Ivan T. Sanderson acclaiming Steiger's attention to facts ... ha! 

What follows is the classic Steiger stew of recycled Forteana, though Merit Books at least graces us with an author's foreword and a gushing back cover letter from editor Tony Licata. Interestingly enough, Licata groups this title with Steiger's two previous books on movie monsters as examples of the "far out," indicating that Steiger hadn't quite staked out the boundaries of his turf yet. 

There's lots of words from both Licata and Steiger about Brad's bold status as an explorer of the unknown, and Steiger quotes Francis Bacon, Herbert Spencer, and Harold Schjelderup to poopoo "skeptics" and anyone who doesn't buy his paper-thin stories as proof of things beyond our ken. In the very first chapter after his author's foreword, Steiger describes how he "rose quickly to the scent of the Unknown" when his friend Jannes Lumbantobing tells him of an Indonesian love curse. This chapter should have been a natural for recycling in Steiger's The Occult in the Orient, but nothing doing.

Some Fortean frequent fliers include the Ourang Medan, the moving coffins of Barbados, Captain Cringle's 1893 sea serpent sighting - with his usual attention to detail, Steiger spells the ship's name Umfli instead of Umfuli - and Count Saint-Germain. His chapter on people who disappear bundles in Flight 19 along with Charles Ashmore, David Lang, and Ambrose Bierce - Steiger would drag these guys out years later for his Strange Disappearances of 1972. Spontaneous human combustion and pyrokinesis also feature.

Steiger finishes up with three chapters of werewolves: the hoaxed feral "wolf girls" Amala and Kamala, a short slip of a chapter with young Marie Bidel attacked by werewolf Perrenette Gandillon, and a longer piece on French werewolves which covers Giles Garnier, Jean Grenier, and others, but doesn't mention the famous Beast of Gevaudan! Steiger ends with a very midcentury note:

Since earliest times, men going into battle have either dressed in the skins of fierce animals or identified themselves with beasts of gore. The Nazi werewolf troops of World War II, the Lion men of Tanganyika and the Simbas of the Congo bear bloody witness to the power of sadistic suggestion on the minds of primitive and propagandized men.

Warren Smith would reuse the two-hearted Italian strongman Agostino Colli for Into the Strange in 1968. His version is shorter but better, lacking Steiger's silly padding of an invented scene of Colli thwarting bullies as a child. Steiger loved his melodramatic "recreations" and cheesy dialogue, turning even otherwise staid and documented events into manipulative maybe-fiction.

Smith's Into the Strange would also reuse the Umfuli sighting (keeping Steiger's Umfli misspelling) and Dr. Robert Menzies' monster fishing, some details from Steiger's chapter on "America's Lost Race," and wholesale copies his ahistorical chapter on the Thuggee with minor tweaks to wording.

Steiger's Thuggee chapter begins:

No organized group of criminals has ever killed as many people as the Thuggee. In the 1830's this Indian murder cult strangled upwards of 30,000 natives and travelers as a sacrifice to their goddess Kali.

While Smith's chapter starts:

No known group of organized criminals has ever killed as viciously and as frequently as the cold-blooded murderers who belonged to the dreaded Thuggee Sect of India. These cutthroat cultists strangled over 30,000 persons during a deadly reign of terror in India during the 1830s. The very mention of their name cause courageous men to cringe with alarm. The victims of each Thuggee massacre were dedicated to their goddess, Kali.

The rest of Smith's chapter continues identical to Steiger's, with rearranged sentences and wording like a 7th grader trying to avoid getting caught for plagiarism.

Merit Books credits Health Knowledge Inc. for three reprinted chapters, "Houses That Harbor Hatred," "People Who Disappear," and "How Many People Are You?" Steiger would recycle that last chapter in 1969's Other Lives, co-authored with Loring G. Williams.

Just like Popular Library, Merit is too cheap to give us a table of contents, so here it is typed out:

1. Author's Foreword (5)

2. The Hex of the Horrible Cupid (8)

3. True Monster Madness (12)

4. Instant Cremation (20)

5. Phantom Ships (23)

6. A Friendly Ghost (26)

7. The Legend of the Vampire (28)

8. The Restless Coffins (32)

9. Genius Idiots (35)

10. Witchcraft - 1965 (38)

11. Cult of Killers (43)

12. 2000 Year Old Man (46)

13. The Witchdoctor's Curse (49)

14. Psychic Cops (54)

15. Surmounting Space and Time (57)

16. Phantom Army (60)

17. People Who Disappear (62)

18. Tracking the Abominable Snowman (72)

19. Black Magic For Sale (75)

20. Hercules With Two Hearts (77)

21. How Many People Are You? (80)

22. America's Lost Race (88)

23. The Mischievious Spook (90)

24. Human Flame-Throwers (95)

25. House That Harbor Hatred (98)

26. Who Was Jack the Ripper? (111)

27. Astrology - Guaranteed? (115)

28. The Wolf Girls (118)

29. Werewolf! (122)

30. France's Epidemic of Werewolves (125)

Merit Books, 1965

BIGFOOT: AMERICA'S NUMBER ONE MONSTER by Daniel Cohen

Watch out! This is a Bigfoot primer for younger readers by reliable pop-sci writer Daniel Cohen which rivals "adult" titles for its measured style and broad coverage of AMERICA'S NUMBER ONE MONSTER. All the usual Bigfoot history is here, with Ape Canyon, Albert Ostman, the Patterson-Gimlin Film, Momo, the Minnesota Iceman, and so on. Cohen even mentions William Roe's sighting and includes artist Morton Kunstler's recreated drawing of the event, but leaves out any description of big Bigfoot breasts, perhaps in deference to his young audience. The Roe/PGF connection would have to wait a few more years to be made explicit ...

There's lots of maps and illustrations, including several of Momo and two different cartoons where the gag is that Bigfoot's a tiny little guy with giant feet.

Cohen does a bang up job relating recent Bigfoot sightings, including many involving UFOs and other high strangeness. The most disturbing of these concerns one Stephen Pulaski of Uniontown, PA, who witnesses some hairy beings next to a parked UFO in a field. He tries shooting them, but nothing doing, and they leave. Later, he suffers apocalyptic nightmares!

The only letdown is Chapter 10, Bigfoot History, where Cohen's normally meticulous style slips and he throws in a handful of Native American "Bigfoot" stories that really seem nothing like it  - he calls the dread Wendigo a "huge creature of terrifying strength" and says it eats human flesh, but leaves out the demonic qualities and function of the cannibalism taboo entirely! One wonders how the other monsters like the Mahoni of the Yukon (not given a source), the Enemy (described by the Tlicho or Dogrib people), and the Gugwes (described by the Micmac) are being misrepresented. Cohen does accurately describe the original Sasquatch people related by J.W. Burns as being "wild Indians" as opposed to apemen.

Cohen tracks Bigfoot all over the country, and worldwide too, including those wonderful Almas who don't seem to get much press nowadays. It's an honest survey of a varied subject that normally gets a ... let's say selective presentation in many other sources. One odd detail sticks out though, when Cohen says that no one knows how the term "Abominable Snowman" came about. Real Bigfoot heads will know the popular story of newsman Henry Newman's coinage of the term, as related by Ivan T. Sanderson and others in Bigfoot literature. Was Cohen ignorant of the story or did he just not believe it?

Cohen doesn't discriminate in whether a Bigfoot sighting is proper or not, and as mentioned the freaky Hairy Bipeds of the '70s Midwest UFO waves get ample inclusion, including credit to Jerome Clark and Loren Coleman's Creatures of the Outer Edge (1978). His final chapter goes over competing theories for the monster, from simple apeman to surviving proto-human to space visitor to inter-dimensional ultraterrestrial to all out hoax. This volume would have been a good introduction to the subject for young readers back in 1982, and despite some nitpicking by your reviewer still holds interest today as a very professional presentation of a well trod subject.

Bigfoot: America's Number One Monster is available to read and download at archive dot org.

An Archway Paperback Original, 1982

THE BIBLE AND THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE by George Johnson and Don Tanner

We're getting back to our roots here for our big 400th post with some classic crank writing on the Bermuda Triangle courtesy Christian authors George Johnson and Don Tanner, as they run us through the connections between THE BIBLE AND THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE! Their religious POV gives us some great Triangle tidbits like missionary couple Warren and Betty Miller of East Lansing, MI, who fly their Beechcraft through a mysterious yellow fog over the Triangle that kills their instruments and leaves them SOL at 11,000 feet! The authors make some biblical interpretations of this yellow fog later on ...

I assume that "the movie" referenced on the cover is Richard Winer's 1971 documentary The Devil's Triangle, narrated by Vincent Price. Typical of '70s Christian authors, everything here is laid out plainly and flows logically within the busted frameworks of biblical literalism and young Earth creationism. Johnson and Tanner quote classic Triangle stories extensively from authors like Charles Berlitz, Adi-Kent Thomas Jeffrey, psychic Page Bryant, Richard Winer, and most interestingly Lawrence David Kusche, whose skeptical book The Bermuda Triangle Mystery - Solved is used to deflate some of the Triangle myth making of the other authors. One example has Johnson and Tanner using the phony line "they look like they're from outer space" from retellings of Flight 19 in an early chapter (quoting Art Ford specifically) and then correcting it later with Kusche's work to prove a point about occultic lies. Our authors have us coming and going though, because both the fake Triangle myths and any genuine weirdness going on out there spring from the same source: Satan! Another heavily cited work is the Christian text UFOs: What on Earth is Happening? by John Weldon and Zola Levitt, which posits that flying saucers are emissaries of Satan.

Johnson and Tanner dredge up Ignatius Donnelly, of course, and W.S. Cerve's 1931 text Lemuria: The Lost Continent of the Pacific for evidence of sunken lands proving biblical catastrophism. Velikovsky and those old flash frozen mammoths also buttress this argument. Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monsters are bad portents of rising occultism, and monster hunting creep Frank Searle puts in an appearance for some satanic synchronicity.

Edgar Cayce and other psychics like Darwin Gross, ECK Master, are also quoted to support catastrophism and the idea of an imminent Atlantean resurrection in the Bermuda Triangle, with the authors disclaiming that, of course, any funny business involved is straight from Satan! Johnson and Tanner work in some Creationist cant too, with clumsy references to the coelacanth and "index fossils" that aren't fully explained. These and many other references come from the 1961 blockbuster catastrophist work The Genesis Flood by John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris.

There's plenty of well done maps and illustrations, including a mysterious deep hole in the Gulf of Oman (relevant to Revelation 9:14) and a diagram of the Devil's Triangle and Bermuda Triangle both leading to Sheol, the biblical underworld. This is Johnson and Tanner's big idea, that Satan and his demonic minions are luring lost souls with UFOs, USOs, sea monsters, Bigfoot, and assorted occult phenomenon into the Triangles and vile vortices of Ivan T. Sanderson, which lead straight to Hades, where they'll await the final judgement to be cast into the eternal lake of fire! The authors suggest getting right with God to avoid this fate, in their specific manner of course.

The back page ads are a snapshot of American Christian concerns in the late '70s, covering economic woes, Eldridge Cleaver's conservative conversion, effective ministry, and another book by Tanner called On the Other Side, dealing with the near death experience of one Martin Ford. Tanner cowrote it with Dave Balsiger, who was also behind In Search of Noah's Ark, which was adapted post haste by Sunn Classic Pictures into the smash hit documentary of the same name. Tanner mentions On the Other Side in the introduction to this title as a reason he began investigating the occult/biblical connections to the Bermuda Triangle.

The Bible and the Bermuda Triangle is available to read and download at archive dot org. Here's to a new year, and some new old friends. Don't step into any bottomless pits!

Logos International, 1976