STRANGE WORLD: Talk to Your Plants

Another entry in Brad Steiger's syndicated "Strange World" column, this time wowing us with plant ESP and the research of Cleve Backster, last seen in National Wildlife magazine. Put that in your pipe and smoke it! But watch the polygraph while you do so ... 

"Tell me the truth Rhoda, there's another gardener, isn't there ..."

This article is rated SSC: Shrimps Strongly Cautioned. Clipped from an unknown paper, unknown year! 

STRANGE WORLD: Monsters Along the Mississippi

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Monsters along the Mississippi ... and in Minnesota and Washington, too! It's another edition of Brad Steiger's "Strange World" column, with Brad recycling the Fremont, WI monster from his pseudonymous 1969 title The Abominable Snowmen, though he's off by one year on when it occurred according to his own original telling. Meanwhile, Warren Smith also used this anecdote in his own Strange Abominable Snowmen from 1970, and correctly dates it to 1968.

Everyone and their mother has written about the Minnesota Iceman, of course, and here Brad relays some of exhibitor Frank Hansen's evolving excuses/explanations for the creature. We're at the point where Hansen was claiming to have shot the monster dead himself in the Minnesota woods, which makes for a convenient cover story on why he's so reluctant to let the supposed corpse be properly analyzed. Nice sideshow zigzagging, Frank!

Brad finishes up with a 1970 Bigfoot expedition by National Wildlife magazine, headed by editor George Harrison. Harrison wrote his own account of this trip as "On the Trail of Bigfoot," for the October-November 1970 issue.

"AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

Clipped from the Santa Clarita Valley Signal, June 5th, 1972.

STRANGE WORLD: Midwest Monster

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Here's a copy of Brad Steiger's syndicated "Strange World" column from the early '70s, which was "carried in 80 American newspapers and publications around the world." Here Brad reuses a Bigfoot story from prior work and adds a newer story on top.

Steiger had previously used the first story of the student outside Rochester, MN, in New UFO Breakthrough with Joan Whritenour, and The Abominable Snowmen, writing as Eric Norman. In these books the student is christened "Bob." The second tale is from 1970 and so postdates those works, though it does turn up alongside Bob's tale in a chapter on "Ghost Monsters of the Midwest" in 1972's Strange Encounters With Ghosts. In terror tale number two, truck driver John Hartsworth describes the creature he saw (and Mike Busby tangled with!) as looking like "a giant cat running on its hind legs" ... yowza!

Close up on that little scamp

Clipped from the Santa Clarita Valley Signal, March 3rd, 1972.