I was an imaginative kid. I've always been an explorer by nature, tantalized by the idea that there was more yet to discover, fascinated but wondering what might lie outside our current view.
The table of contents of "The World's Most Intriguing True Mysteries" by Rupert Furneaux, Galahad Books, 1965. Courtesy Internet Archive.
For that reason, I had all the fascinations you'd expect of a kid with those proclivities growing up in the 1970s, the era of "Star Trek", "In Search Of", Doug Henning on Broadway, and "Close Encounters Of The Third Kind". I also grew up reading Ray Bradbury, Dr. Strange comic books, and more than my share of stories about ghosts and monsters, most especially in "The World's Most Intriguing True Mysteries" by Rupert Furneaux, a book I acquired so young, probably second or third grade, that I cannot possibly recall how it came into my possession. Not content to squint at grainy footage of Bigfoot that turned up occasionally on black and white TV specials, Furneaux filled my imagination with wonder about the Monster of Glamis Castle, the mystery of the Chase Tomb, the Tunguska Event, disappeared aviators, lost children nobody could identify, and much more. My childhood was filled with occasional seances, attempts at astral projection, and similar esoteric pursuits. I suppose I was an unusual child in some ways.
So, of course, as I got older, besides the more prosaic explorations of walking too far and getting lost in the woods, breaking into abandoned buildings and underground bunkers, and similar such earthbound explorations, I did what I could to see if I could find evidence of... The Other Side [cue spooky music]. And so I at various times found myself camped out alone overnight in the formal gardens of supposed haunted houses, driving especially late into the night down lonely desert highways in southern Utah hoping to see a UFO, and more.
And for the most part, I never found anything.
But a few weird things have happened, here and there. These are those.
[code]To be continued... note to self: write up
- waterfalls with hope, scott and missy
- seance at matt's
- timeslip with gene
- cameron's whiskey[code]
