Category Archives: History

Anomaly Archives 2023 Year-in-Review

Audio, History, News, SMiles Lewis, Texas, Video,

Anomaly Archives 2023 Year-in-Review

In the first two weeks of January 2024, Anomaly Archives founder SMiles Lewis gave a month by month review of his choice of the most interesting stories from the year 2023. Below are links to the audio and video versions of that two-part Year-In-Review Special Edition of Anomaly-NOW!

We hope you enjoy this walk down memory lane for the year 2023…

 

Some other Year-in-Review shows…

 

Nearly 250 Top Year-In-Review News Links… from our Anomaly Archives Flipboard Zine

January 2023

 

February

 

March

 

April

 

May

 

June

 

July

 

August

 

September

 

October

 

November

 

December

 

Anomaly-NOW! Podcast Playlist at our YouTube Channel

Anomaly Archives eNews – November 28th, 2022

Audio, eNewsletter, Events, History, News, SMiles Lewis, Texas, UFOs, Video,

Source: Anomaly Archives eNews – November 28th, 2022

The Anomaly Archives Email Newsletter

November 28, 2022 – Austin, Texas

 

Support the Anomaly Archives for #GivingTuesday 2022

Tuesday, November 29th is Giving Tuesday! “GivingTuesday is a Movement that Unleashes the Power of Radical Generosity Around the World.” The Anomaly Archives needs your help to survive and thrive. Great things are afoot in the world of the ParaWeird which encompasses UFOs/UAPs, the Mind, Alien Others, the Paranormal and the Super Natural. Please consider donating via PayPal, Facebook (see here for info on FB’s new donation matching plan for recurring donations) or other avenue. For more information email Contact@AnomalyArchives.org

Facebook Fundraiser / PayPal Donation

First Annual Texas UFO Con in Jefferson, Texas 

The first annual Texas UFO Conference / Convention was held the weekend before Thanksgiving on the heels of its organizer’s long-running Texas Bigfoot Conference. Craig Woolheater launched this inaugural event featuring speakers such as Nick Redfern, Daniel Alan Jones (who also MCd the event), local writers / researchers Mitchel Whitington, George Jones and Rita Louise, myself (SMiles Lewis) and others. The event was sponsored and its audio/video produced by Christopher Jordan of Curious Realm and HC Universal Network. Check out Christopher’s interviews with participants in our Video-Of-The-Week section below.

Christopher Jordan of Curious Realm and
Tx-UFO-Con Master of Ceremonies Daniel Alan Jones

Above images by Daniel Alan Jones.

SMiles Lewis / Founder
AnomalyArchives.org
SMilesLewis.com

 

Show-Your-Support

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Support the Anomaly Archives – Buy Some Merch!

Videos-Of-The-Week

Curious Realm On Location @ The 1st Texas UFO Con in Jefferson
CR Ep 051: LIVE from Texas UFOCon 2022

Featuring special guests from the conference… individual videos linked below:

Above image by Daniel Alan Jones.

Audio-Of-The-Week

KTXK.org UFO & Bigfoot Event Coverage

Tx UFO Con Coverage

  • Nick Redfern is a notable author, researcher and journalist – whose research and writing on cryptids and UFOs has garnered him appearances on the history channel, BBC, Travel Channel and many others – On Saturday he was the key note speaker at the first Texas UFO convention in Jefferson Texas – Sabrina McCormick Reports   (November 23,  2022).
  • Sabrina McCormick caught up with speakers from the first Texas UFO Convention in Jefferson Texas recently. The conference was held this past Saturday there, and featured researchers and authors focusing on UFO encounters in the Lone Star State. In this instalment, she talks with an archivist out of Austin, Texas who is trying to make information sharing about these encounters and other such anomalies easier to access.   (November 22,  2022).
  • The city of Jefferson held its first annual UFO convention over the weekend – Sabrina McCormick covered the event, which featured a panel of experts that spoke about unexplained encounters in Texas  (November 21,  2022).
  • If you’re looking for an out of this world experience, Jefferson, Texas may have the solution you seek. The city will host its first annual UFO convention this Saturday. It will feature a cross section of Texas UFO enthusiasts and experts says event organizer, Craig Woolheater. Sabrina McCormick reports  (November 16,  2022). 

 

Tx Bigfoot Conf Coverage

  • Jefferson Texas has become known as the Bigfoot Capital of Texas, there is even a statue of the famed cryptid prominently placed in the city. For the last several years, the city has hosted the Texas Bigfoot Convention. The three-day event serves as a place where enthusiasts, cryptozoologists and people who have had unusual and unexplained experiences can come to swap stories and learn more about the creature (and a host of other such cryptids). Sabrina McCormick spoke with several of the event’s speakers, this interview features world explorer Adam Davies.  (October 28,  2022).
  • Native Texan, Lyle Blackburn may wear only one hat (that is the signature black, wide brimmed cowboy hat he is often seen in) but he has many roles including author, actor, musician, and cryptozoological researcher. As a child Blackburn became fascinated with the Boggy Creek monster after watching the film. Today, he has become a notable expert on the beast and other such cryptids. Sabrina McCormick spoke with Blackburn at the Texas Big Foot Conference held in Jefferson, Texas this October.   (October 28,  2022).
  • From the wilds of Texas’ back country to the streets of the Dallas Metroplex, paranormal phenomena and strange creatures abound in Jason McLean’s book Metroplex Monsters. Sabrina McCormick spoke with McLean recently at the Texas Bigfoot Conference in Jefferson.   (October 28,  2022).
  • According to the Bigfoot Research Organization, or BFRO, regional sightings of the cryptid in the state of Oklahoma are most prevalent in LeFlore County, close to the Arkansas Border. The second most common area for sightings is nearby McCurtain County. The mountains stretch through both counties. At a recent Bigfoot Conference in Jefferson Texas, Sabrina McCormick spoke with one researcher who has been studying and documenting sightings in the Kiamichi area for more than twenty years. Today she files the last in a series of interviews from that conference.  (October 28,  2022).

KTXK.org

Book-Of-The-Week

From JoshuaCutchin.com:

“Eyewitnesses, investigators, and cryptozoologists worldwide contend ample evidence exists supporting the survival of large, hairy, apelike creatures alongside mankind today, lurking in the wilderness. By all appearances, these beings appear wholly natural, interacting with their surroundings and leaving behind hair, blood, droppings, and, of course, footprints.

Yet despite their apparently physical nature, bigfoot and its hairy hominid kin consistently appear mired in High Strangeness—the peculiar, ineffable, and nonsensical absurdities so often encountered in paranormal phenomena.

Some sightings seem more consistent with mythology than biology. Bigfoot often present supernatual attributes, like luminescent eyes or the ability to pass, ghostlike, through structures.  Anomalous lights are regulalry seen in areas of frequent sasquatch activity. Footprints persistently, if rarely, display odd numbered toes, and—most bafflingly—bigfoot trackways suddenly terminate in the middle of open, untouched terrain.

In Volume 1 of Where the Footprints End: High Strangeness and the Bigfoot Phenomenon, authors Joshua Cutchin and Timothy Renner carefully examine not only the intersection of hairy apemen with global folklore—of poltergeists, faeries, extraterrestrials, magic, witches, ghosts, and archetypal women-in-white—but also question the fundamental assumptions underlying contemporary cryptozoological beliefs surrounding bigfoot.”

Available from Dark Holler Arts

Anomaly News Headlines

Check out more news links at the

Anomaly Archives Flipboard

[NOTE: Inclusion of news & event info is purely informational

and does not indicate endorsement.]

Scott Corrales on Bob Girard

Archives, Books, Collections, Featured, History, ,
Bob Girard, Scotia, NY – April 19th 1987. Photo Credit: Clas Svahn / AFU.

Scott Corrales on Bob Girard

Scott Corrales – Inexplicata – The Journal of Hispanic Ufology

It was hard to miss the ads for Arcturus Books in the early days, when I took my first steps into the pool of ufology. Overwhelmed with information as I was, I never thought to contact them or get a copy of their catalogue: magazines, ‘zines, newsletters and bulletin board postings (remember the long-gone days of BBS?) provided a dizzying mix of information where abduction claims, tales of underground bases and straight-out conspiracy theory shared the cramped pages like passengers on a subway train during rush hour.

It was much later that Joan Jeffers – a devoted Pennsylvanian researcher of UFO and related phenomena – told me to get a hold of Bob Girard, saying he could find any book or periodical I might remember from the early days of sauceriana, or even material from other countries. Oddly enough, I was sort of in touch with Bob already. His former partner, the late Ron Bonds, had set up Illuminet Press expressing an interest in publishing my translation of Salvador Freixedo’s “Visionaries, mystics and contactees”, a great introduction to the Spanish Jesuit’s vast body of work on the paranormal. Bob’s wife Monica provided the cover art for the project, so when I picked up the phone to call Arcturus, no introduction was really necessary.

Photo of Bob Girard – Credit: Clas Svahn / AFU

I spoke for hours with Bob that first time. What I’d been told was true – he knew all the corners, light and dark, of the paranormal community, current and past – and an encyclopedic recollection of old books. We spoke at length about his own work, “Futureman”, a dystopic view on the ultimate fate of humankind if the age of abductions proved true. Disturbing reading, but written in a most insightful style.

So it was that Bob helped me rebuild my collection of UFO books, which had been lost over the course of years, some lost over the course of international moves and others forsaken as new interests commanded my attention. Getting into “new” materials was never difficult thanks to Bob’s reviews, which made the Arcturus Books catalogue a joy to read – probably more so than a number of newsstand offerings available at the moment! Some descriptions are etched in my mind, like an old samizdat whose cover “depicted a hayseed peeing into a pond with a flying saucer hovering overhead” – I’m paraphrasing here, but I still smile at the laughter the description caused in me at the time.

Some reviews were at the other end of the spectrum: scathing indictments of the subject matter and sometimes the author. Words that could either make you want to order the book to see if such an assessment was warranted, or enough to make one turn the page and hope for better.

1993 saw the birth of my first newsletter on “UFOs in Latin America and Spain” and Bob Girard was pleased to add it to Arcturus’s offerings, cautioning me not to charge too much for it, since “mystics never have any money”. The price point must’ve been right, as SAMIZDAT (as it was called) became a strong seller for Arcturus over a time frame of five years. When I announced that I the little newsletter was folding (its news stories rendered stale by the Internet), I told him I intended to come back with a new idea. “Whatever you do, make sure it’s good!” he said, and INEXPLICATA came out within months, available in print format for many years before the same situation – the immediacy offered by electronic sources – forced it to migrate to the web, where it has remained since 2003.

We didn’t see eye to eye on everything, though. The Chupacabras Diaries, my initial offering on Puerto Rico’s paranormal predator, didn’t really meet his approval. Bob thought the correct approach to take should have been a dismissive one. He particularly disliked a chapter bearing the title “It’s In the Trees- It’s Coming!” – a homage to Jacques Torneur’s The Night of the Demon (1957). Now you’re part of the problem, I believe he said. However, he gladly accepted my self-published copies of TCD and sold them through Arcturus to a world that was only just starting to hear about the creature’s exploits, way before it became a media phenomenon.

When people ask me where I obtained my knowledge of book publishing, having never worked in the industry, I always say it was thanks to those long telephone sessions with Bob Girard. The ins and outs of the publishing world were as familiar to him as the dark corridors of the paranormal. A good and knowledgeable friend who richly deserves to be remembered as a 20th century Renaissance man.

 

Scott Corrales & Inexplicata – The Journal of Hispanic Ufology

See also:

 

 

International Cryptozoology Conference: January 2016 – St. Augustine, Florida

Cryptozoology, Events, Featured, Folklore, History, News, Science, , , , , ,
International Cryptozoology Museum Conference – January 4th-6th, 2016
St. Augustine, Florida
cryptozoonews.com/iczmc/

 

Source: CryptoZooNews.com

Join us in Florida this winter. We proudly announce the International Cryptozoology Museum Conference, January 4-5-6, 2016, in America’s Oldest European-Settled City ~ St. Augustine, Florida.

The three-day event is a scientific cryptozoology conference being held near the site of the 1896 “Giant Octopus” beaching.

The conference will be a thoughtful experience for guests. Please sign up today (click here or see the individual options below).

The event will unfold over three days during Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of the first full week of 2016. This takes place at the end of St. Augustine’s Festival of Lights. It is a beautiful, calm time of year in St. Augustine, Florida, with moderate temperatures and festive decorations still in place in this European appearing city.

ICM Conference 2016 | International Cryptozoology Museum

International Cryptozoology Museum – Facebook

International Cryptozoology Museum Conference – Facebook

International Cryptozoology Museum Conference – Facebook

Ozarks Anomalous: Eureka Springs Obit & Performance Art Imitates Life

History, News

Lovely County Citizen, October 23, 2014 – Dolores Cannon Obit and Norman Baker Cancer-Quack Psychic-Surgery Performance

Well known channeler Dolores Cannon passed away a year ago. She leaves behind a legacy of several books, lectures, and her continuance of Lucius Farish’s Ozark UFO Conference.

Our correspondents in Eureka Springs pass along newspaper clippings for us to archive and pass along to our membership in the same spirit as Lucius Farish did with his UFO Newsclipping Service.

In this October 23rd, 2014 edition of the Lovely County Citizen newspaper we read about the passing of Dolores Cannon as well as the performance art event featuring psychic surgery at the famously haunted Crescent Hotel as a remembrance of Cancer Quack Norman Baker. [See image captures of the news-clippings below]

Now On-Display at the Anomaly Archives: The Books of Dolores Cannon

  • The Legend of Starcrash
  • Five Lives Remembered
  • Between Death and Life
  • The Convoluted Universe: Book One
  • The Convoluted Universe, Book Two
  • Keepers of the Garden
  • The Three Waves of Volunteers and the New Earth
  • The Custodians: Beyond Abduction

 

Lovely County Citizen, October 23, 2014  …  pages 3 & 19

UFO Conference organizer dies by Kathryn Lucariello


 

The Doctor Is In: Sean-Paul Cuts Through Baker Legend by Jennifer Jackson


The Ghosts of the Greer Building – TxDoT’s Transportation News, October 2003

Archives, Austin, History, Magazines, , , , ,

A few years ago someone asked me if I’d ever heard any weird stories about the Dewitt C. Greer building downtown. They proceeded to tell me they had heard tales of folks seeing blood-smeared walls and other strange haunting phenomena on certain floors within specific rooms.

Recently, as I was working on archiving paper files and periodicals held by the Anomaly Archives, I came across the October 2003 issue (Volume 29, Number 2) of TxDoT’s Transportation News magazine whose cover shouts:

GHOSTS. . . Discovered in the Greer Building !!

The Ghosts of Greer by Mike Cox / Editor

If Harvey Hubert hadn’t fatally stabbed that young Austin man on Halloween night in 1916, he might have lived to see the fine new Highway Department building go up where the Travis County Jail once stood.

But that’s not how it worked out. At 1:50 p.m. on Aug. 23, 1918, Sheriff George Matthews sprang the trap on the gallows inside the jail and Hubert paid for his crime at the end of a rope.

Hubert, 34, had the distinction of being the last of nine men legally hanged in the castle-like stone jail, built for $100,000 in 1876 at the corner of 11th and Brazos streets — present location of the Dewitt C. Greer Building.

Who knows? Maybe Hubert’s spirit has something to do with the mysterious footsteps and strange noises some TxDOT employees have reported hearing at night in the big meeting room and on the eighth floor when the building’s supposedly empty.

But for anyone who believes in ghosts, there are plenty of suspects.

This edition of Transportation News is also archived online here:

Read the complete article here:

 

 

Summer Flying Saucer Cinema Series

Austin, Events, Folklore, History, Meetings, News, Science, UFOs, , , , , , , ,

SUMMER FLYING-SAUCER CINEMA SERIES

Saturday Night June 12th / “Rain Day” Sunday the 13th

SUMMER FLYING SAUCER CINEMA SERIES

This new monthly event will be a FREE showing of lesser known “Flying Saucer Films” with a focus on those that have important points to be made regarding the nature of paranormal, UFO and other anomalous phenomena, as well as society’s cultural reactions to UFO related phenomena.

UFO related phenomena and the Modern Wave of Flying Saucer sightings in the United States have had a lasting effect upon American Popular Culture. For that reason we feel it fitting to host this new event series at the South Austin Popular Culture Center (frmly the South Austin Museum of Popular Culture).

Our next showing is … Invaders From Mars, the 1953 original classic.

Go HERE for links to info about the event.

. . .

SUMMER FLYING-SAUCER CINEMA SERIES

Saturday Night June 12th / “Rain Day” Sunday the 13th

FREE FILMS UNDER THE STARS

Presented by the ANOMALY ARCHIVES

At the South Austin Popular Culture Center

1516B South Lamar Boulevard @ 8pm / Film Starts at 8:30pm CST

Please bring your own chair to assure seating

ATTENDEES MUST PARK NEXT DOOR ON COLLIER STREET

Continue reading Summer Flying Saucer Cinema Series →

Convict Hill Road

Austin, Folklore, History, , , , ,

“In the 1880’s a budget crunch led the state of Texas to bring convicts in to the area to work the quarry. 8 convicts died while working and were buried in the area known as Convict Hill. These convicts now haunt the road”

– Streets of Fear – Convict Hill Road – FEARNet.

Is There Anything Paranormal or Mysterious About Convict Hill Road?

by SMiles Lewis

In early October of 2009 I was contacted by an associate producer for the online webisode series “Streets of Fear” who was wanting to know if I knew anything paranormal or mysterious about Convict Hill Road here in Austin, Texas. The online series is part of the horror lineup of programming offered at Fear Net dot com that focuses on ultra brief media bytes exploring stories of American streets with really spooky names, such as  Bloody Pond, White Wolf, Dark Hollow, Widow Susan, Beelzebub, Gore Orphanage, Hell Hollow, Shades of Death, Gallows Hill, Purgatory, Spook Rock, Burnt Church, Witches Rock, Bloods Point, Tombstone Canyon, Mount Misery, Extraterrestrial Highway, and Bloody Spring. They had contacted me after finding my friend James Bankston whose article in the Oak Hill Gazette had gotten their attention.

Continue reading Convict Hill Road →