COSMIC DEBRIS: The Astrolo Watch and More Strangeness

From Strange magazine, a very cool looking watch! Just send $19.95 plus shipping and handling to some guys in Van Nuys! No sightings of this online nowadays, but there are plenty of other zodiac watch options out there.

And another sighting of the Cybertronic Destiny Wheel, now on offer alongside its mate the Cybertronic Detector and a half dozen other gewgaws. Take 'em all home for just $59.95!

Edit: check the comments for some more info on the Destiny Wheel, including patent information! Thanks, TK!

But just what was Strange magazine all about? It's an obvious Fate knockoff, and would you believe that those cheap manjacks at Popular Library have simply raided their copious backlog of Brad Steiger's Strange paperbacks to give us 31 more-or-less thrilling reprinted tales of the unknown? We also get a handful of tales copied over from Steiger's Strange Powers of E.S.P. from Belmont Books, such as the mini-skirt psychic, Rommel's ghost in the sand of El Alamein, and a seance attended by the Beatles. Other familiar Steiger standbys include Olaf Jansen's tales of the Smoky God of the inner earth bundled up with those damnable Deros, the man who records voices from outer space, and scads of ghost stories! Some of these are tales that Steiger did in fact source from Fate, with full credit given, making this even more of a ripoff volume. Some of the stories are better than others, but the good ones make up for the filler. His "Smoky God" chapter on Hollow Earth ideas - reprinted from New UFO Breakthrough from Award Books - is a standout, with more than enough goofiness to make up for some lame poltergeists and coincidences in other chapters. An interesting detail: some of the stories are credited to Steiger's birth name, Eugene Olson. Also worth noting that Strange had a far higher percentage of generic self help ads compared to Fate, which maintained a good rate of occult flavoring in its adverts.

Finally, here's an ad for another compilation mag - this one shares cover art with Steiger's The Occult in the Orient, which is pretty cool to be fair. 

As for what the hell this guy's doing, I have no idea ...

From Strange magazine, Volume 1 - Number 3, 1971. Courtesy Popular Library.

THE HOLLOW EARTH by Dr. Raymond Bernard

Here's a work of pure crank genius from Dr. Raymond Bernard, A.B., M.A., Ph.D., detailing the massive conspiracy to hide Admiral Byrd's discovery of a South Polar entrance to the Hollow Earth! Dr. Bernard was born Walter Isidor Siegmeister, and spent his life on a crusade for "alternative health remedies" and Hollow Earth truth. He died in 1965, and The Hollow Earth was published posthumously with a foreword by one Robert Fieldcrest, who plugs the vintage quack cancer cure Krebiozen and Dr. Wilhem Reich's bogus Orgone energy.  Here we see an early connection between the paranormal genre and "alt medicine" scams which continues to this day. The whole thing is kicked off by Bernard's incredulity at Admiral Byrd's description of journeying to a land "beyond the pole" ... surely Admiral Byrd meant he went inside the Earth, and was forced to withdraw any further elaboration by the CIA! Says Bernard:

Byrd remarked: "The present expedition has opened up a vast new land." The word "land" is very significant. He could not have referred to any part of the Antarctic continent, since none of it consists of "land" and all of it of ice, and, besides, its geography is fairly well known and Byrd did not make any noteworthy contribution to Antarctic geography.

Bernard elaborates his thesis when he stumbles across a text in a Brazilian bookstore titled From the Subterranean World to the Sky: Flying Saucers by O.C. Huguenin which bridges classic 1800s Hollow Earth theories with the new flying saucer craze of the space age. This results in some convergent evolution alongside the Shaver Mystery which also posited UFOs based in the Hollow Earth, albeit with demonic Dero controllers - Bernard hypothesizes that his UFO pilots are benevolent and engaged in a millennia long plan to uplift mankind into a golden age.

The complete text of The Hollow Earth is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Dell Publishing, 1969