If you’ve followed the Elfis Network from the beginning then you know of my early interest in Alternate Reality Gaming and their potential for “mucking up the works” for paranormal and parapolitical researchers. You may also know that my interests were rekindled in 2007 by the provocative hypotheses of blogger DreamsEnd, who speculated that the mysterious suicides of artists Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake were some kind of sophisticated art hoax or viral marketing / alternate reality game. After a very rough period of defending his theories online, blogger DreamsEnd temporarily pulled up shop, taking down his websites. My own re-investigations into ARGland dwindled and I too went back to my normal para activities…
That is until I became aware of a new blog that was following many of the threads explored by DreamsEnd; KadesKorner. Here was another blogger (with a writing style nearly identical to that found at DreamsEnd) writing about many of the themes and topics we’d been exploring during the Theremicity period: Andy Kaufman, Election Fraud, Andy Stephenson, false identities, the Franklin Coverup, the Octopus and PROMIS, Middle East parapolitics and … Theresa Duncan and ARGs! And through “Kade” I learned of a new ARG to watch out for; what has come to be called TGATT or The Great And The TerribleakaI’m Sorry. But before getting off into the I’m Sorry mindfu…, er um, ARG, let’s take a peek at some of the more interesting ARGs and Viral Marketing campaigns that have been bleeding through their alternate ARGiverse realities into our own.
Reuters is reporting that Russian authorities have assumed custody of a five year old girl who has spent the majority of her life locked in an unheated flat in the Siberian city of Chita with a group of dogs and cats. The child, who authorities assume to be around five years old despite stunted growth that makes her appear to be around two years of age, is non-vocal and exhibits dog-like behavior, such as barking and jumping at doors whenever care takers leave the room. (More at Reuters.com)
The girl, who is being called “Natasha”, is far from the first documented feral child. While the mythic founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus (who legend claims were suckled by a she wolf after being saved from death by having their basket set in the Tiber River and washing ashore Moses style) are among the most famous of the feral children and Rudyard Kipling’s fictional Mowgli, from the Jungle Book, lends his name to the syndrome for children who adopt the characteristics of animals they grow up with; there are several documented cases of actual feral children. These cases include:
There are also a number of children who, while not technically “feral” in the sense of being raised by animals, have been abandoned due to mental incapacity and then had the feral child myth constructed around them (such as the famous Indian “wolf girls” Amala and Kamala) or otherwise held in isolation by their parents or care-givers. In addition there are a number of unsubstantiated or poorly documented stories out of African nations , especially those savaged by years of war such as Sierra Leone and Uganda, of children raised by apes or monkeys after losing their parents.
There are also the outright hoaxes, usually of the carnival side-show variety where a physical or mental deficiency was exploited for monetary gain, however there are enough verifiable accounts to make the phenomenon an intriguing study.
While the word Bigfoot usually conjures images of the deep forests and mountains of the Pacific Northwest, there is also a rich tradition of southern hominid sightings. Often known by various local names, the southern Bigfoot doesn’t get as much attention (or respect) as his northwestern cousins, but his impact on the local people and their lore has been just as profound. Southern Fried Bigfoot, premiering tonight on the Documentary Channel, takes a look at some of the more notable southern sighting reports, including the Fouke Monster of Fouke, Arkansas; Louisiana’s Honey Island Swamp Monster; the Lake Worth Monster of Lake Worth, Texas; and Florida’s Myakka Ape or Skunk Ape. Southern Fried Bigfoot also talks with the various authors and field researchers involved in the study of southern Bigfoot phenomenon about the historical record and continuing efforts to document the species.
The subtle emphasis throughout the film, intentional or accidental, seems to be the impact of these creatures on the local culture. Interview subjects, for instance, emphasize the legacy of local names and legends, many linking southern “wild man” stories to reports that pre-date the first use of the term “Bigfoot” by hundreds of years. Even the use of cheesy, Bigfoot themed clip art imagery and sports mascot logos throughout the documentary, while seeming amateur at first, helps emphasize the impact these stories have had on the human experience.
The documentary is a worthwhile watch for anyone with even a passing interest in the subject. While the documentary does not contain any major revelations or new info for the dedicated students of Bigfoot and cryptozoology, it is engaging and entertaining. What will probably be of most interest to those already familiar with the creatures profiled will be the ideas expressed by the various personalities involved in the search for Bigfoot in the south. DVD extras providing additional information related to various reports, info on hoaxes, the difference between reports in the North and the South, the sounds associated with Bigfoot reports, etc., will also appeal to those with a deeper interest in the history of reported sightings and the personalities involved in researching the creature.
Additional showtimes are scheduled for Saturday, April 18 (5 PM Eastern, 4 PM Central), Wednesday April 29 (8 and 11 PM Eastern, 7 and 10 PM Central), Wednesday, May 6 (5 PM Eeastern, 4 PM Central), and Saturday, May 16 (9 PM and Midnight Eastern, 8 and 11 PM Central).
For those researching strange phenomenon, establishing and maintaining a good reputation, a measure of respect, and the legitimacy of their studies is always an uphill battle. Mainstream journalist and pundits usually scoff, when they bother to pay attention at all. Hoaxers and scam artists garner big notice in the press. But researchers who are respected in their particular cloistered field, and who have called a hoax a hoax from the outset, are relegated to a footnote in the mainstream news reports. That is, they are relegated to a footnote if they are lucky enough to be noticed at all.
In the world of conspiracy theory, ufology, cryptozoology, and fringe science, your damned when you speak out, and damned when you don’t.
So, given all of this, what does respectability even mean to these fields? Enthusiasm and interest ebbs and flows, as it does for anything, and people choose to construct a world-view that best suits them. If that means that all bigfoot reports are hoaxes so that they aren’t afraid to go into the woods at night, or that ghosts are real because nothing else explains the creepy feeling they get in the third floor guest room where Uncle Jim died, then that is what people choose to believe.
With incidents like the recent pseudocide of 9-11 Truther Ace Baker, blogged on here by SMiles Lewis, and the Georgia bigfoot body hoax pulled off by a police officer and former prison guard (professions comprised of individuals normally accepted as paramounts of honesty and respectability) in August of last year, it seems valid that we pause and ask ourselves some questions.
How important is reputation in these fields? Jacques Vallee is educated, well written and spoken, not prone to jumping to conclusions, and yet he would be lumped in with the “saucer nuts” by most mainstream journalists. The same could be said for hominid researchers such as Jeff Meldrum, who like Vallee has an academic reputation to maintain outside of his personal studies. Yet while the Meldrums and Vallees of this world suffer under the derision and constant scrutiny of colleagues and the media, or keep their private pursuits to themselves; known hucksters and hoaxers like Tom Biscardi continue to benefit from the flippant attitude toward the subjects and lack of background research undertaken by various local media outlets. Biscardi is a known and proven hoaxer, yet he can pull into any small town and have the cameras on his crew in a matter of hours.
Perhaps, as guest blogger Oliver Hallen muses in the post below concerning UFO reports by police officers in the UK, respect and reputation are concepts as culturally and contextually loaded, and therefore as ephemeral, as the UFOs and beasties we endeavor to understand.
(The views expressed by Oliver Hallen are his own and do not reflect the opinions or views of AnomalyMagazine.com, its editorial staff, or myself. — Jeremy D. Wells)
911 Truther Shoots Movement in Foot - Commits Pseudocide
by SMiles Lewis
As if the 911 Truth Movement weren’t weird and ridiculed enough already - now it goes and shoots itself in the foot … again.
How often do people come across a severed human head lying in the middle of the road? Apparently as often as someone might happen to tune-in and hear a radio-show co-host commit suicide live on the air. Or is it simply a matter of weirdness acting as a strange attractor for ever more weirdness? Whatever the explanation, I witnessed both within forty-eight hours of each other.
On Tuesday, January 6th at about 2:35 pm (Central Standard Time) I was tuning in to the webradio stream of upstart Austin alternative media outlet, Freedom Underground Radio. This is the new radio station “rising from the ashes of We The People Radio Network.” WFU Radio has been founded by a co-founder of WTPRN. (Full disclosure: WFURadio has recently started carrying the PsiOp Radio show which I co-host with Mack White.)
I was tuning in to JamesFetzer’s show, The Real Deal. Now, I’m not a huge fan of his research nor a regular listener to his show. He had on someone whose name I recognized as having been on the show before as a co-host who has been active within the 911-TV-Fakery branch of the conspiracy community, AceBaker. Apparently they had switched roles for this particular show with Ace interviewing Jim instead of the other way around.
Within moments of tuning in I had the thought, “Is this guy (Ace Baker) about to commit suicide?” And moments later he did. He was speaking of regret, longing and despair regarding his daughter and deceased parents, about the disrespect and outright attacks that others in the movement had heaped upon him. “I’m coming home,” he said before I heard the sound of a gunshot. The moments leading up to and those that followed that bang were some of the most awkward live radio I’ve ever experienced.
Fetzer was understandably more or less speechless and to his credit seemed to keep his head. He managed to call Baker’s wife and leave a voicemail begging her to check on Ace saying he was worried about him. This is especially amazing for Fetzer as we were later to learn that his own Mother had killed herself when he was only 11 years old and he says had told Ace about this previously.
Of course immediately, the possibility of a hoax was apparent, at least doubly so because of the involvement of someone involved in the “fakery” branch of 911 conspiracy theories who is also a sound engineer. But even contemplating the hoax possibility I was still feeling shocked and shaky - calling my friend Mack and posting online and within Jack Blood’s Deadline Live website chatroom.
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.
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.
In a recent forum discussion (Triangle ufo at Rigorous Intuition forums) someone brought to my attention video of an alleged triangular UFO that shoots a red beam of light. The video is posted online at several websites: Zwamneus Report, YouTube, LiveLeaks and others.
The information posted at these video links alleges that the footage is connected to the recent article posted at the Irish Independent News website headlined We’re not alone . . . politician and pilot spot UFO that states:
“Footage, filmed on a camera phone at 10.35pm on August 3 near Dunboyne was also played and replayed to over 70 delegates who attended the fifth Irish International UFO conference in Carrick-on-Shannon.
The triangular shaped image, with lights at each point, which appeared to send a red laser-type light towards earth, drew gasps of amazement from the 70 or so delegates who attended the world premiere of the footage.”
The above quote does sound a lot like the footage in the video at the cited video sites. But the text at the YouTube link (recently updated) makes the claim that the footage was “found along a trail near the North Carolina / Tennessee border. It was found before the Irish video was announced. I only put it up when I heard about that one because it sounded like the same thing.” The poster goes on to say that he has given the camera and footage to a “UFO / Paranormal” researcher and that they will be posting the full, higher quality video online this weekend. [As of this weekend, it has indeed been updated to confirm our suspicions.]
Somehow I serendipitously came across the website for the Hoax Research Center and when I clicked through the headline UFOs: Phoenix Lights Effect Reproduced I (re)discovered the Annual Speaking of Strange UFO Experience and Fake UFO Contest organized by paranormal author, researcher and radio personality, Joshua P. Warren. And what should I see on that page but a picture of Jeff Wilson’s First-Place Winning UFO from last year’s 3rd Annual Speaking of Strange UFO Experience, which looks strikingly similar to the video in question:
Those who follow such things are probably already aware that two Georgia based “Bigfoot Hunters” are claiming to have the body of one of the creatures in their possession. They have been building suspense via YouTube postings and their website, www.bigfoottracker.com, for the past couple of months, claiming that the big disclosure was right around the corner, as soon as a few legal issues were resolved. As this post is being written the duo, police officer Matthew Whitton and former corrections officer Rick Dyer, who bill themselves as the world’s greatest trackers, are in Palo Alto, California, with Tom Biscardi preparing for a press conference to disclose their discovery, and possibly DNA evidence, to the media.
While some are being cautiously optimistic, most Bigfoot researchers are remaining skeptical, for various reasons. For instance Craig Woolheater, of the Texas Bigfoot Research Conservancy, disclosed during a recent broadcast of the Squatchdetective internet radio program that the two principals attempted to become associated with his organization via a fictional third party, a “Dr. Paul Van Buren”, and claimed to be associated with the organization on their website when no such association existed. This has lead to some conjecture that the entire event is designed to poke fun of the Bigfoot community, a la the Penn and Teller hoax film. Dr. Jeff Meldrum has stated that their method of preserving the body, among other things, leads him to remain skeptical as well. A surgeon and a primate specialist who have examined the photos have told me that the supposed intestines lying on top of the “body” in the photo are too small to represent what they would expect to see even in the small intestines of a creature of this size. Others have noted the similarity of the creature’s face to a widely available Bigfoot costume. While the nares on the creature pictured are very similar to those seen in known primates, such as the gorilla, some eyewitnesses have stated that it does not resemble the creature they have seen. Finally there is the association with proven hoaxer Tom Biscardi, as well as inconsistencies in the story as presented via the Bigfoottracker.com website and YouTube videos and in the interview on the Squatchdetective program. For example, the duo have videos that show them involved in “Bigfoot research”, which led them to a hunter who shot this creature, but on the Squatchdetective program they claim to have not been involved in research prior to this discovery and to have stumbled across it while hiking. While they state on the program that the You Tube videos were intended to poke fun at Bigfoot researchers, they also say that the people featured in the videos are “real people” who contacted them via their tip-line. While this may simply be bad editing and/or lack of explanation on the part of the duo, it exemplifies their flippant treatment of the situation. They also claim that rigor mortis had set in when they found and transported the body out of the forest, however after about 72 hours rigor mortis releases, so the body should not have been rigid if the level of decomposition supposedly shown in the photos had time to occur. Their description of the creature as more human than ape-looking also contradicts the photo images, however they have insinuated in the Squatchdetective interview that the photo released may not be of the actual creature, reason for further skepticism from many.
While many in the Bigfoot community have taken an “I’m skeptical but I want them to prove me wrong” approach, hoping that will be enough to raise them above any fallout a hoax will have on the community, I will personally come out and say that I feel this is a hoax. There are too many elements that don’t fit, and the entire situation, from attempting to freeze the animal in a block of ice to the “sale of the body to an undisclosed millionaire” is way too reminiscent of the classic Minnesota Iceman situation.
Posted May 28, 2009 
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That is until I became aware of a new blog that was following many of the threads explored by DreamsEnd; KadesKorner. Here was another blogger (with a writing style nearly identical to that found at DreamsEnd) writing about many of the themes and topics we’d been exploring during the Theremicity period: Andy Kaufman, Election Fraud, Andy Stephenson, false identities, the Franklin Coverup, the Octopus and PROMIS, Middle East parapolitics and … Theresa Duncan and ARGs! And through “Kade” I learned of a new ARG to watch out for; what has come to be called TGATT or The Great And The Terrible aka I’m Sorry. But before getting off into the I’m Sorry mindfu…, er um, ARG, let’s take a peek at some of the more interesting ARGs and Viral Marketing campaigns that have been bleeding through their alternate ARGiverse realities into our own.
I was tuning in to 
Fetzer was understandably more or less speechless and to his credit seemed to keep his head. He managed to call Baker’s wife and leave a voicemail begging her to check on Ace saying he was worried about him. This is especially amazing for Fetzer as we were later to learn that his own Mother had killed herself when he was only 11 years old and he says had told Ace about this previously.
