Bedtime Stories

I am the first one to admit, I spend far too much time on YouTube. On the other hand, it is much less a time waster than Facebook (which I visit occasionally) or Twitter (which I abandoned completely because of the endless and ever-growing tide of liberal hate), and it is often a source of vital information. After all, where else are you going to find short, easily digestible videos about the important things in life--meteor impacts, steampunk music, model building, zombies, woodworking, dogs, UFOs, traffic accidents in Chula Vista, ancient, civilizations, volcanoes, comic books, the Fermi Paradox, abandoned shopping malls, silly rants, science fiction, the foibles of humanity, old TV series, Simulation Theory, and, of course, kittens?

Now and then, something I watch on YouTube leads me to a new book. I found out about The Three Body Problem on a channel called Quinn's Ideas...smart fellow, that Quinn. And all the hullabaloo about that terrible Rings of Power series (Amazon itself soured me with their own teasers, trailers and first fifteen minutes of the series) led me back to rereading LOTR after more than fifty years...overwritten, surely, but Tolkien's facility with the English language makes you wish he had overwritten more. From Gary Lovisi's channel, I learned about a novel featuring HP Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard as characters...a little embarrassing, that one, since it was published twenty years ago, and I should have known about it. And sometimes a channel leads me to an unexpected and pleasant surprise.

ISBN 979-8435530322

ISBN 979-8835857425

I've been a fan of the YouTube channel Bedtime Stories for several months. Despite the name, the stories they relate are not the kind of nighttime tales you want to tell your kids before they go to sleep, not if you actually want them to go to sleep. The fare offered touches upon aliens, ghosts, mysteries, unexplained phenomena, true crime, odd deaths and urban legends. They are delivered in a delightful English accent (Yorkshire?) and are accompanied by evocative art with some animated effects. The channel has been around for five years, so I have been slowly working my way through past episodes. In one of them, they mentioned the publication of two books, each containing forty stories previously presented to viewers.

I was hesitant when I heard the word "transcripts," but I took author Richard While at his word that the chapters were more than verbatim copies of the episodes. He was correct. The reader gets revisions, added information, further speculation, and, sometimes, corrections...no matter how thorough one may be in researching, authors are fallible creatures, but one of the strengths of Richard and his colleagues is that they never really close a case, always searching for more information as investigations turn up new data and witnesses.

The stories really are a mixed bag. In the first forty tales we have the high strangeness of "The Ikley Moor Alien," the historical conundrum of "The Flannan Lighthouse Mystery," the very disturbing case of "The Body on the Reservoir" from Brazil, and my favorite, "There is Something in the Woods." In Volume Two, we have "The Lair of the Wendigo," an examination of the folklore also used by Ambrose Bierce in his classic story; "Tales from Skinwalker Ranch," looking into Indian legends and UFOlogy; the urban legend of "The Manchester Pusher," which asks the question of whether a secret serial killer might haunt Manchester, England (much like the perhaps-mythical Smiley Face Killer in America, also covered by the channel); and "The Kentucky Goblins," a UFO/demon story near and dear to me since I used to live just a stone's throw from Hopkinsville in the 70s.

If you like mysteries, unsolved crimes, paranormal phenomena, UFOs, cryptids, urban legends, ancient folklore impinging upon modern life, or wonder why so many people vanish without a trace in the national parks of America, these books might be of interest. They are available in paperback and in less expensive e-book versions. I got the paperbacks, myself. As one reviewer noted, the books are easy to pick up, but hard to put down. Me? All I say is, don't read the stories at bedtime. 

We Were Hunting a Monster

There were three of us crammed into an old yellow VW Beetle hurtling at breakneck speed through black woods. It was the early Seventies, and we were being chased by monsters.

I've written elsewhere in this blog about being a UFO investigator for the UFO Research Bureau (UFORB), but I don't think I mentioned that we worked out of office space leased by an organization called the World Truth Institute (WTI). It was quasi-religious but mostly philosophical, the sort of thing that's called New Age nowadays. It's founder, Warren B. Knox, had written a book called Moroni's Message, a kind of adventure novel with religious overtones, the sort of thing that would become popular years later when Raiders of the Lost Ark was a box office hit.

Like us (me, Steve & Gary), Warren was a Chula Vista guy. When his book was published, it got a nice write up in the 26 April 1973 issue of the Chula Vista Star-News, for which I was at the time still writing book reviews. I did not, however, review Warren's book. Mine was an actual book review column, called Etc, and the publisher, Lowell Blankfort, wanted Warren's book to be reviewed and him interviewed by the Religion editor because of the religious and metaphysical aspects of the book.

Warren was a smart fellow, but his concerns were so esoteric that we at times hardly knew what he was talking about. As UFO investigators, we were mostly concerned with lights in the sky whereas Warren was looking quite a ways beyond. We really didn't get involved with WTI or its work. What we appreciated was that WTI sub-leased back office space from a realtor in a set of old stucco buildings (built circa 1930) at the southwest corner of Third and H Street, and that we got to use that space to store our files and to have our meetings on Wednesday evenings. As I wrote, we were investigating the UFO Phenomena, each of us coming at it from our own particular points of view, but that didn't stop us from going off on a tangent now and then, especially if we could tie it, even tenuously, to Flying Saucers. One such tangent was Bigfoot. While Steve held firmly to Donald Keyhoe's machines-from-outer-space theory and that the Ufonauts were likely gray, green or blond-haired Nordic aliens, Gary thought it was more than possible that the Flying Saucer pilots, at least some of them, were Bigfoot (Sasquatch) creatures and that sightings of the hirsute monsters were actually UFO sightings misinterpreted.

Gary was not alone in this idea and one of its proponents was writer John A. Keel (author of, among others, The Mothman Prophecies and Our Haunted Planet), whom all three of us idolized. If Keel thought a Bigfoot alien was a possibility, we really couldn't mock Gary for believing it...well, we mocked him a little. As I wrote, we usually did not involve ourselves with WTI affairs, but Warren was always on the lookout for things that might interest us lads, and he had contacts with people in San Diego County that we, being mere callow youths, did not have.

One Wednesday evening, Warren showed up for one of our meetings, not unheard of, but unusual. He told us about a man he knew who lived in the East County, which back then was mostly undeveloped. The man, Dr John Bador, had written Warren a letter (he gave us a photostat for our files) that told a very strange story. Dr Bador, a retired medical man, owned a ranch up in the mountains that was fenced in around his ranch house, a step he took because of the large packs of coyotes that roamed the area at the time. On several nights, he observed a tall (7-8 ft) creature approach his fence and observe his house. He described it as being covered with thick fur except on its hands, feet and face...and, yes, the feet were big. Monsters, whether they were aliens or Missing Links, really did not fit into Warren's world view, but he thought we might be interested, especially since the East County had long been a UFO hot spot. We were interested, some more than others. That was how we came to be careening wildly through the dark in Gary's yellow VW Bug hunting for monsters. or being hunted by them.

I should point out that none of us were strangers to monster lore. As long-time Chula Vista residents we had heard about the Proctor Valley Monster all our lives. Just what was the Proctor Valley Monster? Nobody really knows. Some claim it was goatish or like a bull, others more humanoid, but there was no dissension about its reality. Well, maybe a little from some quarters, who unwisely mocked the PVM.  Proctor Valley was due east of Chula Vista. It has since been conquered and annexed by Chula Vista, part of the extensive Eastlake Development, but at the time it was wild and undeveloped. A drive along Proctor Valley Road was a journey into mystery and danger, especially at night...and, yes, we had made the trip at night in Gary's VW Bug. No monsters though. Having hunted for it, we thought ourselves well qualified to tackle this new monster. We were determined to find Dr Bador's monster (or Gary's UFO pilot). The only thing we did not consider in our impetuousness was what we would do if we actually caught the creature. Yes, we had much in common with dogs who chase cars.

Late one Saturday afternoon we set out for the East County, planning to enter the brush not far from Dr. Bador's ranch. The good doctor had been warned by Warren we would be in the area, just so he would know not to call the Sheriff or to shoot us. We had everything needed for a successful monster hunt -- tape recorder, camera, map, flashlights, sodas, candy bars and beef jerky. We entered the brush following a barely passable track. When we reckoned we had reached a good spot from where we could hike down to within view of Dr. Bador's place and still keep the car hidden, we waited quietly as darkness gathered around us.

Slightly after midnight, we heard something (maybe a lot of somethings) moving through the woods. They were not approaching the fence, but rather were closing in on Gary's car. Nervously, we made our way back to the Bug, rolled down the windows and listened to the movements of things we never saw. I should point out here that all three of us were City boys. I had been a Boy Scout, but sleeping in a tent at a Boy Scout camp, surrounded by the amenities of modern camping, is much different than sitting in a car, surrounded by totally dark woods with monsters closing in. We were so concerned about keeping quiet that none of us even bit down on a Hershey Bar, lest the snap of the chocolate give us away. The sounds in the woods grew fainter. Then something massive and dark crashed through the brush and landed very close to the car. There may have been some growling involved.

I don't want to say that any of us panicked. I know I was not panicked. Even though more than four decades have passed since that night, I'm pretty sure I was calm and cool during the entirety of the startling intrusion. But I can't really speak for the others. There were screams, but I'm pretty sure mine was not among them. Let us merely agree that there were screams and that some level of panic was involved. I don't want to point fingers, of course, but I will mention that Gary was driving and that 1.5 seconds after the advent of whatever-it-was we were in motion, jouncing at perilous speeds along trails we could not see, After maybe ten minutes of blind flight (we were certain we heard sounds of pursuit) we burst into the midst of a ranch. Unfortunately, it was not Dr Bador's place and this rancher had not been warned to refrain from firing his shotgun. With the boom loud in our ears, we zoomed up the ranch's access road, hit the main county road, and didn't slow down till we reached the familiar streets of Chula Vista.

Our report, which we shared with WTI, indicated that after extensive research, including an on-site inspection, we did not find any conclusive evidence of either Bigfoot or UFO visitation. We came to the conclusion Dr Bador was either the victim of a hoax or had misinterpreted natural phenomena, something we often came across in our investigations. We marked the case CLOSED. That was our story, and we stuck to it.

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