It was a little over a year ago that I posted my first article over here at Anomaly Magazine; a look back at the year 2007, as a year of Fortean anniversaries.
A look back at 2008, personally, as a nation, and as a blogger here at Anomaly, reveals a number of false starts and stops, lots of disappointment, and tons upon tons of soul searching.

Personally, throughout 2008 I’ve been self-employed, unemployed, taking advantage of free time to work on the blog, too busy looking for work to work on the blog, too poor to concentrate on anything but finding a job, and finally working a job and too darn tired to dedicate myself to keeping up a blog-post-a-day schedule like I would like to. It isn’t just me. My fellow contributors here have been in similar situations. So has most of the nation as we suffer through one of the worst economic downturns since the early Reagan years (incidentally, the only time I remember being hungry as a kid, when my dad was laid off).

We’ve posted some really good blog articles over here at Anomaly, with little pomp or fanfare, and little feedback from our readers. We’ve posted other articles, calling out national figures for their unbalanced coverage of UFO sightings and assuming no one would ever read, only to find that key players and authors are following us. If you are reading this, thanks for being a lurker. We do this for you, whether you comment or not. If you’d take some time just to say “hi”, let us know you’ve been here, it would mean the world to us.

If you decide not to say anything, that’s fine. I’ll keep writing. Here, elsewhere, or even on the backs of napkins. Lot’s of stuff happened over the course of 2008. We’ve had an historic election. We’ve suffered through yet another bigfoot hoax (and yet somehow Tom Biscardi still thrives… the cockroach of the bigfoot world whom no stink apparently sticks to.) I’ve not had the time to process it all, much less put together a comprehensive “year in review” blog post about all the strange things to happen over the past year.
But rest assured, these posts will continue to go up. Regularly, sporadically, or otherwise.
Things will continue to happen. Folks will continue to wonder “why”. And we’ll continue to ponder the possible reasons.
2008 wasn’t the best of years for us. But we hope you’ll join us in the coming year, as we strive to be more consistent, more timely, and to provide you with a forum for learning about, following, and discussing anomalies.

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I found this item about those crazy Raelians on Huffington Post thanks to Chez Pazienza over at Deus Ex Malcontent.

For those not familiar with the Raelians, they are a saucer cult founded by French race car test-driver turned spiritual guru Claude Vorilhon. The Raelian ideology is the standard ancient astronaut world seeding theory, with heaping dollops of late 60s and early 70s free love, and generically spiritual “war is bad” platitudes. They have been in the news most recently for their support of, and claim that they had succeeded in, human cloning. Vorilhon, who currently goes by the name Rael and claims to be the son of an earthly mother of an extraterrestrial father, founded his religion after an alleged close encounter in 1973 where he met his father and learned the truth behind our creation myths.

That all may be true. Or it could be that after failing as a pop-singer (under the name Claude Celler) and as a race car driver, and with his youth fading as quickly as his car in his competitors’ rear-view mirrors, Vorilhon decided the only sure fire way to continue getting laid by a different woman every night was to start a free love cult.

The truth is for more devoted seekers than me to puzzle out.

But for now, enjoy the links. Pull out your old UFO paperbacks and look in the index for anything on Vorilhon and Rael. Enjoy your holiday. And try not to be too upset at the lost opportunity for deliciously comic irony that could have been found in a group celebrating the season when we remember the virgin birth of the Prince of Peace, with a World Peace Orgy.

Merry Christmas. Happy Chanukah. Festive Festivus. Happy New Year.

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In addition to the various folk tales and fairy stories they collected in their publications, Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm also collected supposedly true stories of tragedy, such as the infamous Children Play at Hog Killing, from the first edition of their book and dropped from later editions as too grisly. In these types of stories a group of children, usually after witnessing a butcher slaughtering a hog, play a game to reenact the spectacle with the end result being the tragic death of the child playing the role of the pig.

The butcher boy story may or may not be an exaggerated tale based in actual occurrences, as analogs are found in other regions and cultures. But regardless of the butcher boy’s veracity, there are real life tragedies, ones we can read about in our hometown newspapers, that occur often enough to reinforce the importance of these folk stories as cautionary tales. They may even give us some clues to the origins of some of the various prototypical fairy tales that have maintained perennial popularity and invited repeated revisitation and reinterpretation.

The recently reported story of a teenage boy, held captive with chains about his ankles in a perfectly kept suburban home in one of the safest communities in Northern California, tells us as much about the nature of our species and our society as any folk tale. Hollywood couldn’t concoct a more chilling tale. Here is your stereotypical “they looked like a normal happy family” from the schlocky Saturday matinee horror feature, in the flesh. Here is your warning about the dangers that can lurk behind a pretty facade. Here is your wolf in sheep’s clothing, Snow White’s beautiful but poisoned apple, your fallen morning star tempting you with pretty sin. Here is your gingerbread house, with white collar witches inside, waiting to gobble you up and strip away innocence like marrow sucked from a bone.

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