More information on Stuart Saturn is available at the sites Terrestrial Funk and Coolopolis. There are also two interviews with guitarists from Stuart's album by one Alex R. Archambault.
From Fate, Volume 33 - Number 4, April 1980.
UFOs, Bigfoot, Lost Continents and more in the wide, wild world of the 1970s paranormal paperbacks ... and beyond!
Saturday, November 21, 2020
STRANGE MONSTERS AND MADMEN by Warren Smith
Monsters of all kinds! Slimy, hairy, scaly, scary, and of the human variety as well. Many strange bigfoots and sea serpents, including several bogus Russian lake monsters, and some real space creeps too.
Smith's lined up some heavy hitters here, including one of the earlier pop culture connections of Dracula to the historical figure Vlad Tepes (referred to here as Vlad III). Just a few years later Raymond T. McNally and Rudu Florescu would deliver their essential In Search of Dracula rendering quickie treatments like Smith's two page chapter moot. Serial killers H.H. Holmes, Belle Gunness, and the Bloody Bender Family are more examples of stories well trod nowadays. The Patterson-Gimlin film is also allotted a two page chapter which doesn't particularly stand out among the other sundry savage bigfoots and ape men. It's interesting to see which "monsters" here have endured in pop culture and which, like "Pennsylvania's Puzzling Purple Glob," have faded away. The famous Beast of Gevaudan gets a beefy chapter, and another chapter is a ritual for becoming a werewolf.
Smith does his usual mixing and matching too, with those vicious hairy dwarfs of Venezuela popping up, Florida's dinosaur/penguin from 1948, and yet another variant of Smith and Steiger's story of the jungle sentry attacked by a hairy, "oily" monster. A creepy "black dwarf" who bedevils some medieval monks before tunneling away would later resurface in Steiger's Mysteries of Time and Space. Smith sources "Florida's Mysterious Sandman Monster" from Joan Whritenour, editor of the Saucer Scoop newsletter and also a collaborator with Steiger.
The final page is a wisp of an entry on that titan of terror, the Mothman - no mention of the Silver Bridge collapse or other peripheral weirdness later popularized by John Keel in his 1975 book.
Strange Monsters and Madmen is available to read and download at archive dot org.
Popular Library, 1969
Saturday, November 14, 2020
MAPS OF THE UNKNOWN: Dugway Proving Ground
Before Roswell entered the popular imagination (and after an infamous VX gas leak that killed nearly 4,000 sheep) this was a likely location for Hangar 18 or similar skulduggery. From The Ogden Enigma by Gene Snyder. Courtesy Playboy Press, 1980.
COSMIC DEBRIS: Fate Reviews Brad Steiger
From Fate's "New Books" column by David Techter, reviews of two of Steiger's recent books, Sex and the Supernatural and The Mind Travellers.
STRANGE ESP by Warren Smith
Warren Smith continues his STRANGE saga through Popular Library with this entry from 1969, focused on ESP. There's men with "Computer Eyes" and "IBM Minds" and good ol' "X-Ray Vision!"
Smith revisits railroad tycoon Arthur Stilwell, last seen in Brad Steiger's Beyond Unseen Boundaries. We also get a reprise of the well-worn stories of Clever Hans and Jef (or Gef) the Talking Mongoose. "Doc" Anderson rates two whole chapters, although really the second one could have been folded into the first, being concerned solely with a brief anecdote of Jackie O's post-Camelot nuptials. The predictions listed in his first chapter don't add up to much either, come to think of it! Anderson was a regular subject for Smith and Steiger. Japanese artist Kyoshi Yamashita gets a very unflattering chapter which focuses on his status as an "idiot savant" and doesn't include anything vaguely related to ESP!
There's a heavy load of celebrity entries, including Eartha Kitt, David Niven, and Hypnotist to the Stars Arthur Ellen. Geronimo and Teddy Roosevelt make a fine pair of historical persons tangentially connected to psychic phenomena, while President Garfield's assassin Charles Guiteau takes things in a more sinister direction.
The silliest chapter title in this volume? My money's on "Deadly Vision of Death" ... it's double the deadly! This title is available to read and download at archive dot org.
Sunday, November 8, 2020
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