I struggled through 2019 without celebrating the 100th anniversary of Charles Fort's Book of the Damned, and before this infinitely worse year of 2020 passes I want to make mention of the 50th anniversary of John A. Keel's Strange Creatures from Time and Space [SCFTAS for short]. To quote an old web-page I devoted to the subject:
"The present writer has always been fascinated by monsters, of the movies, the comics, literature, mythology, folklore and even (maybe) reality. By age eleven I thought I knew all there was to know about ghosts, monsters and bizarre creatures in general.
"Then one night my father took my brother and me to the bowling alley. We were expected to entertain ourselves while he bowled for the Warren Petroleum Company league. I slipped over to a nearby drugstore and scanned the bookracks. Nothing. For some unknown reason, I dug past the front layer of books on one rack and found a neat paperback with the compelling title Strange Creatures from Time and Space in canary yellow on a somber violet-blue background. A Fawcett Gold Medal book written by someone named John A. Keel, it featured a fantastic cover painting by Frank Frazetta. I plunked down my six bits and spent the evening reading.
I had never heard of the Mothman of West Virginia, or of the Beast of Bungay, or of the Men-in-Black who harassed UFO witnesses. I had never heard of the Burning Man of Germany, or of Thomas, the Winged Cat, or of the Bigfoot-type creatures reported from such unlikely places as New Jersey and Florida. Far from being knowledgeable about Strange Creatures, I was merely a novice."
****
In the years following I collected news clippings, magazines, books, articles and newsletters of cryptids, UFOs and other matters, mostly because I was a geeky Fortean, but with an agenda hidden in my subconscious.
I remember I dream I had in the late 1970s, in which I found a copy of "the expanded, updated, annotated Strange Creatures from Time and Space." I even remember the cover illustration of this dream-book: A nineteenth-century steam train is chugging over a canyon-spanning trestle in some desert area [probably the American West]. A Godzilla-sized Tyrannosaurus rex is menacing the train, a creature so tall its head is level with the cars even though it is standing in the canyon. (There is no story like that in SCFTAS, of course.) Since then I've worked on my own Expanded Edition (very occasionally, not constantly, or I'd have been finished long ago).
As I wrote, this much-maligned year of 2020 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of SCFTAS, and for years I hoped I'd have the Expanded and Updated Edition ready in time. Circumstances -- and the ever-increasing number of cases I wanted to include -- precluded that. Instead, I concentrated on a few key subjects, simply to get an idea of what the whole mess might look like. For instance, I took a page-long reference to what are now known as "phantom panthers" or "alien big cats" and blew that up into a forty-two page, twenty-three thousand word mini-book in itself. I'm not going to publish it anywhere, because that would entail up numerous copyright violations. An outline of the contents, however, runs:
-- A quote from Ambrose Bierce's story "Eyes of the Panther"
-- The original excerpt from SCFTAS (a mere 233 words)
-- The trilogy of articles from FATE Magazine that jelled the concept of phantom panthers, those being
-- "Mystery Animals Invade Illinois" by Loren Coleman (March 1971)
-- "On the Trail of Pumas, Panthers and ULAs (Unidentified Leaping Animals) Part I" by Jerome Clark and Loren Coleman (June 1972)
--"On the Trail of Pumas, Panthers and ULAs (Unidentified Leaping Animals) Part II" (July 1972)
-- "Mystery Animals" by Charles Bowen (Flying Saucer Review, Nov.-Dec. 1964)
-- "The Surrey Puma," an excerpt from Janet and Colin Bord's Alien Animals (1981)
-- "Ozark Country Panthers," from Vance Randolph's We Always Lie to Strangers (1951)
-- "The Wampus," from Ronald L. Baker's Hoosier Folk Legends (1982)
-- "The Manimal," from Creatures of the Outer Edge by Jerome Clark and Loren Coleman (1978) [COTOE for short]
-- "Another Upright Panther" from Herbert Ravenel Sass's “The Panther Prowls the East Again!”, Saturday Evening Post (Vol. 226, no. 37), March 13, 1954
-- "And Another Upright Panther" from Bruce S. Wright's The Eastern Panther (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin and Co., 1972)
-- "Invasion of the Lion People" also from COTOE
-- "At Last, the Final Secret of the Phantom Panthers!" an excerpt from Merrily Harpur's Mystery Big Cats (Loughborough, UK: Heart of Albion Press, 2006)
-- "Pennsylvania Panther" from Stan Gordon's Astonishing Encounters: Pennsylvania’s Unknown Creatures, Casebook Three (Greensburg, PA: Stan Gordon, 2016).
Hmmm. 233 words ended up expanding into 23k-plus words. A hundredfold increase. That implies that the fully-done expansion will weigh in at about ten million words. I'll check in again at the 60th anniversary . . .
"The present writer has always been fascinated by monsters, of the movies, the comics, literature, mythology, folklore and even (maybe) reality. By age eleven I thought I knew all there was to know about ghosts, monsters and bizarre creatures in general.
"Then one night my father took my brother and me to the bowling alley. We were expected to entertain ourselves while he bowled for the Warren Petroleum Company league. I slipped over to a nearby drugstore and scanned the bookracks. Nothing. For some unknown reason, I dug past the front layer of books on one rack and found a neat paperback with the compelling title Strange Creatures from Time and Space in canary yellow on a somber violet-blue background. A Fawcett Gold Medal book written by someone named John A. Keel, it featured a fantastic cover painting by Frank Frazetta. I plunked down my six bits and spent the evening reading.
I had never heard of the Mothman of West Virginia, or of the Beast of Bungay, or of the Men-in-Black who harassed UFO witnesses. I had never heard of the Burning Man of Germany, or of Thomas, the Winged Cat, or of the Bigfoot-type creatures reported from such unlikely places as New Jersey and Florida. Far from being knowledgeable about Strange Creatures, I was merely a novice."
****
In the years following I collected news clippings, magazines, books, articles and newsletters of cryptids, UFOs and other matters, mostly because I was a geeky Fortean, but with an agenda hidden in my subconscious.
I remember I dream I had in the late 1970s, in which I found a copy of "the expanded, updated, annotated Strange Creatures from Time and Space." I even remember the cover illustration of this dream-book: A nineteenth-century steam train is chugging over a canyon-spanning trestle in some desert area [probably the American West]. A Godzilla-sized Tyrannosaurus rex is menacing the train, a creature so tall its head is level with the cars even though it is standing in the canyon. (There is no story like that in SCFTAS, of course.) Since then I've worked on my own Expanded Edition (very occasionally, not constantly, or I'd have been finished long ago).
As I wrote, this much-maligned year of 2020 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of SCFTAS, and for years I hoped I'd have the Expanded and Updated Edition ready in time. Circumstances -- and the ever-increasing number of cases I wanted to include -- precluded that. Instead, I concentrated on a few key subjects, simply to get an idea of what the whole mess might look like. For instance, I took a page-long reference to what are now known as "phantom panthers" or "alien big cats" and blew that up into a forty-two page, twenty-three thousand word mini-book in itself. I'm not going to publish it anywhere, because that would entail up numerous copyright violations. An outline of the contents, however, runs:
-- A quote from Ambrose Bierce's story "Eyes of the Panther"
-- The original excerpt from SCFTAS (a mere 233 words)
-- The trilogy of articles from FATE Magazine that jelled the concept of phantom panthers, those being
-- "Mystery Animals Invade Illinois" by Loren Coleman (March 1971)
-- "On the Trail of Pumas, Panthers and ULAs (Unidentified Leaping Animals) Part I" by Jerome Clark and Loren Coleman (June 1972)
--"On the Trail of Pumas, Panthers and ULAs (Unidentified Leaping Animals) Part II" (July 1972)
-- "Mystery Animals" by Charles Bowen (Flying Saucer Review, Nov.-Dec. 1964)
-- "The Surrey Puma," an excerpt from Janet and Colin Bord's Alien Animals (1981)
-- "Ozark Country Panthers," from Vance Randolph's We Always Lie to Strangers (1951)
-- "The Wampus," from Ronald L. Baker's Hoosier Folk Legends (1982)
-- "The Manimal," from Creatures of the Outer Edge by Jerome Clark and Loren Coleman (1978) [COTOE for short]
-- "Another Upright Panther" from Herbert Ravenel Sass's “The Panther Prowls the East Again!”, Saturday Evening Post (Vol. 226, no. 37), March 13, 1954
-- "And Another Upright Panther" from Bruce S. Wright's The Eastern Panther (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin and Co., 1972)
-- "Invasion of the Lion People" also from COTOE
-- "At Last, the Final Secret of the Phantom Panthers!" an excerpt from Merrily Harpur's Mystery Big Cats (Loughborough, UK: Heart of Albion Press, 2006)
-- "Pennsylvania Panther" from Stan Gordon's Astonishing Encounters: Pennsylvania’s Unknown Creatures, Casebook Three (Greensburg, PA: Stan Gordon, 2016).
Hmmm. 233 words ended up expanding into 23k-plus words. A hundredfold increase. That implies that the fully-done expansion will weigh in at about ten million words. I'll check in again at the 60th anniversary . . .
