Coming Up For This Month’s Anomaly-Academy Patron Presentation…
Adam Gorightly Presents…
“The Bob Beck Collection: Space Age Photos From The Past!”
Sunday, May 25th, 2025 at 5pm Central / 3pm Pacific
“What initially inspired myself and collaborator Greg Bishop to co-author A is for Adamski: The Golden Age of the UFO Contactees was the discovery of The Beck Collection, a series of photos taken by a fellow (you guessed it) named Bob Beck.
In 1948, Robert “Bob” Beck (1925-2002), started a photographic-audiovisual firm, Color Control Color Laboratories Company, that designed special lighting techniques for a number of MGM productions like An American in Paris and Show Boat. In the 1960s, Beck was responsible for the groundbreaking special effects featured in Roger Corman’s psychedelic epic The Trip.
Somewhere along the way, Beck befriended George Van Tassel, attending several Giant Rock Interplanetary Spacecraft Conventions where he photographed the UFO contactees in attendance, many of these photos which appear exclusively in A is for Adamski. Van Tassel’s work in “cellular rejuvenation” dovetailed with similar interests shared by Beck related to alternative health cures produced by electromagnetism. To this end, Beck was involved—at least in an advisory capacity—with the construction of Van Tassel’s Integratron.”
MEANWHILE … So much has been going on in the weird wild world of UFOlogy / UAPology it can be hard to track it all. Check out founder SMiles Lewis’ recent coverage of all things anomalous in the two most recent episodes of Anomaly-NOW!
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.
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.
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:
Anomaly Archives presents Robert Powell on UFOs & Govt
Saturday, March 29th, 2014
Free Event – Donations Welcomed!
Robert Powell has been the Director of Research at MUFON since 2007 and is also the head of MUFON’s Science Review Board. He is an active Field Investigator in the state of Texas having completed over 120 investigations and is a MUFON Star Team member. He is one of two authors of the detailed radar/witness report on the Stephenville Lights. Robert is also a member of the Society for Scientific Exploration, the National Space Society, and the Académie d’Ufologie. Robert is active with FOIA requests to various government organizations to obtain information on historical cases and is a co-author of a book published in July 2012: UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry. Robert currently resides in Austin, Texas.
Robert has a BS in Chemistry and is a former collegiate debater. He has 28 years in engineering management in the semiconductor industry from 1978 to 2006. While working at Advanced Micro Devices he has taken numerous internal courses related to device physics, design of experiments, and statistical analysis. He helped Advanced Micro Devices develop its first flash memory technology that is used in today’s flash cards for cameras, PCs, video cameras, and other products. His experience includes managing a state-of-the-art chemistry laboratory and managing a Research and Development group that worked on nanotechnology using atomic force microscopes, near-field optical microscopy, and other techniques. Robert is also a co-holder of four patents related to nanotechnology.
Talk Synopsis: UFOs & Government: The Historical and Changing Role of Government over Time
Governments have been concerned about UFO sighting reports since WWII, but historians have never made a concerted attempt to understand their often contradictory responses to the phenomenon. How could something of such potential technological and national security consequence have left no visible trace in the history books? Whether it’s a conspiracy or not, the subject has been marginalized to such an extent that it’s as if the military never acted with alarm on the heels of a UFO sighting, as if the intelligence community never took up the issue behind closed doors, as if government research and development efforts never attempted to duplicate the phenomenon. But they have. Robert Powell will discuss how governments, especially the U.S. government, have dealt with the UFO phenomenon and will provide a hypothesis as to why the phenomenon took its roots during WWII.
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.
“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”
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 (via Archive.org) had gotten their attention
I told the Fear Net producer that I was familiar with the road but had never heard of any paranormal haunting stories associated with the road. I said that I would check all available resources that the Anomaly Archives had and would inquire amongst the network of contacts associated with the Scientific Anomaly Institute. I spent the rest of the week reviewing every catalog in the Anomaly Archives collection related to ghosts, hauntings and other folklore associated with supposed weird and paranormal locales. Not a single one in the more than a dozen I checked made any reference to paranormal activity associated with Convict Hill Road. Lots of references to documented haunting encounters at the Texas Governor’s Mansion, Austin State School, Driskill Hotel, and even Round Rock’s crypto-ghostly Hairy Man Road (and its festival [via archive.org] which was going on that very week). I told the producer all of this but they were still interested in getting me and James on tape talking about the history of how the road got its name.
The story of how the road got its name is simply a matter of Texas’ historic use of prison convict labor and the circumstances surrounding the burials of those convicts killed trying to escape or who died by other causes. Rumors circulated that those who were killed or otherwise died on site at the quarry were buried there, under the mounds of limestone rocks piled up around the timbers known as dead-men. As my friend James Bankston had succinctly written:
Some men died on the site, while others tried to escape and were shot dead. Eventually a legend grew up that these dead prisoners were buried under limestone cairns on what came be known as “Convict Hill.”
In the 1980s when real estate developers got interested in that area, they found they had to confront this question head-on. We’ve all seen enough scary movies to know that bad things happen to people who build on abandoned burial grounds.
Archaeologists, historians, and geologists were all brought out to see if they could literally find out where the bodies were buried. Soil tests and other methods concluded no one had been buried on Convict Hill, but a study of the historic record did offer another explanation to the mystery.
Derricks had been employed to move and haul stone at the quarry. They had been secured by guy wires and heavy timbers. Since the soil was so rocky that the timbers could not be buried in the ground, they had to be stabilized by heavy piles of rocks.
The timbers themselves were called “dead men,” so it’s easy to see how that spooky name, tomb-sized piles of stones, and notoriously cruel working conditions could form in the public mind this legend that convicts had been buried on Convict Hill.
So, with a name like Convict Hill Road and rumors of buried prisoners who’d been shot trying to escape, the location was bound to generate at least a slight background noise of paranormal speculation, yet the official literature and internet searches for possible paranormal folklore associated with the location seem to be non-existent, aside from this single video recorded by some bored teenagers “investigating” an alleged abandoned house just off of Convict Hill Road:
Despite the lack of official recorded encounters I was open to the possibility that perhaps a visit to the recently created Convict Hill Quarry Park, where I was to meet a local cameraman working for “Streets of Fear” and which allegedly marks the geographic center of the old thousand acre quarry operation, might still hold some sort of spookiness that could tingle my own less than psychically sensitive perceptions. Upon arriving at the park, I discovered a small group of amateur paranormal investigators who were embarking on their own informal investigation of the park. I asked if they had been there before and if they had ever heard any stories associated with the place. The gentleman seemed to indicate that this was so. I believe the man I spoke with was Martin Estrada of Montopolis Paranormal and he was there with a woman whom I believe is the organizer of Latino Ghost Hunters of TX Paranormal Warriors. Once inside I leisurely explored the small acre or so sized last remaining vacant lot along Convict Hill Road. As you can see from the pictures I took with my camera-phone the park is very nice and not spooky at all. There are numerous piles of small, medium and large sized limestone chunks, many with chip marks or bored through by drill bit holes.
After giving myself the tour, getting bitten by mosquitoes, sweating profusely in the still sweltering early October humidity, and falling on my rear end from the tallest mound of rocks, I finally gave my comments to the cameraman. It is a very awkward thing to be speaking to the space beside a cameraman’s head as if there were an interviewer there, let alone having to incorporate the questions they want you to answer into the wording of those answers. I reported the fact that I and my colleagues at the Anomaly Archives lending library of the Scientific Anomaly Institute could find no documented incidents of anything mysterious or paranormal associated with the street, just its interesting history as a probable torturous work environment for the inmate labor and the subsequent rumors of buried convicts. I explained, as did James Bankston, how tales of extreme distress, often associated with tragedies, are generally accepted as the instigators of much paranormal activity. I explained how it could be possible that there are in fact actual stories of hauntings being handed down from person to person, generation to generation, just waiting to be recorded into official catalogs of the paranormal literature. I spoke of the Fortean Name Game and how so often strange and scary sounding place names such as Diablo are given for places with a history of strange phenomena. But of course the editors of this ultra-compressed 2 minute segment managed to squeeze in the one moment where I alluded to the fact that I’ve “been hearing that there is in fact paranormal activity associated with Convict Hill Road.” I was alluding to the general belief in the possibilities of such stories existing as had been implied by the “Streets of Fear” associate producer, by the bored videocamera-wielding teenagers out ghost-hunting and by the local paranormal group I’d encountered just as I entered the park. It’s possible there could be buried convict bodies somewhere under the thousand acres of now surburbanized homes and that the souls of said departed could be haunting the lives of the living but have yet to officially report there plague of poltergeists. However, if such encounters have happened, noone has bothered to document them in any formal way.
As interesting as the possibility of ghost stories or paranormal activity associated with this historic site might be, for me personally, I find the site’s historic value (in relation to Inmate Labor / Texas Labor Strikes – see links below) to be of much more import and interest.
– SMiles Lewis
Photographs from the Convict Hill Quarry Park Shoot:
Further Resources on Convict Hill Road, Texas Labor and Paranormal Phenomena
Audio Resources:
PsiOp Radio 91 – 091011 – SMiles discusses the Fear Net episode on Convict Hill Road’s history
Fortean Name Game & Anomalist Resources:
Wild Talents by Charles Fort (on coincidence and synchronistic relationships of things)
One dies, get another: convict leasing in the American South, 1866-1928
By Matthew J. Mancini
Cowboy Strike of 1883 by Robert E. Zeigler
“In 1883 a group of cowboys began a 2½-month strike against five ranches, the LIT, the LX, the LS, the LE, and the T Anchor,qqv which they believed were controlled by corporations or individuals interested in ranching only as a speculative venture for quick profit. In late February or early March of 1883 crews from the LIT, the LS, and the LX drew up an ultimatum demanding higher wages and submitted it to the ranch owners. Twenty-four men signed it and set March 31 as their strike date. The original organizers of the strike, led by Tom Harris of the LS, established a small strike fund and attempted, with limited success, to persuade all the cowboys in the area of the five ranches to honor the strike. Reports on the number of people involved in the strike ranged from thirty to 325. Actually the number changed as men joined and deserted the walkout.”
Strikes by Ruth A. Allen, George N. Green, and James V. Reese
“In September or October 1838 the Texas Typographical Association, the first labor organization in Texas, struck the Houston publishers and secured a 25 percent wage increase.”
“Not until after the Civil Warqv did bona fide strikes occur. Those of 1870 were typical. In January of that year, Houston telegraphers joined a short, unsuccessful nationwide strike against Western Union; in April, the Austin Typographical Union suffered a disastrous defeat; in May, Galveston brickmasons struck for a raise but returned to work without it; and in November, the engineers and brakemen on the Houston and Texas Central Railway lost their jobs as a result of a walkout over wages. The first work stoppage involving more than a handful of workers occurred in June 1872, when the management of the Houston and Texas Central Railway began requiring all employees to sign an agreement releasing the company from liability for accidents on the job.”
“The number of strikes increased through the seventies, as the number of unions and labor militancy grew. The peak year until the middle eighties was 1877, when, in addition to numerous small strikes, major work stoppages occurred among dockworkers in Galveston and railway workers on the Texas and Pacific. Both the large strikes were marked by considerable violence. The dockworkers’ strike saw the first use of African Americansqv as strikebreakers in Texas (see SCREWMEN’S BENEVOLENT ASSOCIATION.)”
…
“The first strike in Texas noted in official records occurred in 1880, when fifty employees of the draying industry stayed out 150 days but were denied an increase in wages. Between 1880 and 1886, 100 strikes occurred, involving 8,124 workers; establishments involved were closed for a total of 450 days; striking workers were out for a total of 708 days each; and the loss due to strikes was estimated at $1 million. These strikes included the Cowboy Strike of 1883,qv in which more than 300 cowboys in the Tascosa area struck for higher wages and better working conditions, and two strikes in Galveston, one of 280 cotton handlers lasting sixty-four days and the other of 150 longshoremen against the use of black laborers lasting two days. The first failed, the second succeeded. One of the most spectacular strikes was the Capitol Boycottqv in 1885. The largest number of strikes was called by the building trades unions, but the largest number of workers involved in any one industry was in transportation. The third largest group involved was the West Texas coal miners. The greatest number striking in any one year was 4,154, involved in seven strikes in 1885. Of these, 1,500 were longshoremen in the port of Galveston, and the major part of the others were in transportation. Additional thousands of Texas laborers joined the national strike of telegraphers and sectional strikes against the management of the western and southwestern railroads. In 1885 Texas ranked ninth among forty states in number of workers involved in strikes (4,000); for the six-year period it ranked fifteenth. Seventy-five of the 100 strikes, chiefly interstate strikes of telegraphers and railway workers, occurred in the year 1886; seventy-four of these were called by an organized labor group. Twenty-four of the twenty-five strikes between 1886 and 1894 were called by organized groups. The most significant were in the coal-mining areas, where industrial troubles were almost continuous from 1884 to 1904. In 1884, for six months, 450 coal miners carried on a losing strike against a reduction in wages. Troubles began in the mines in Erath County in 1888 and lasted for four years; Texas Rangersqv remained in the area for more than a year. The strike was largely unsuccessful.
After 1886 annual figures on the number of strikes are not available, but a summary for the quarter century from 1881 to 1905 shows a total of 341 strikes in Texas involving 37,000 workers.”
Austin and Oatmanville Railway by Nancy Beck Young
“The Austin and Oatmanville Railway Company was chartered by the Capitol Syndicate (see XIT RANCH) on November 5, 1883, to connect Kouns, a station on the International and Great Northern Railroad five miles south of Austin, with Oatmanville (now the Austin suburb of Oak Hill). The road was built to haul limestone for use in the building of the Capitol.qv Although the limestone was unsuitable for the exterior of the building, stone from the quarry was used for the foundation and basement walls, cross walls, and backing for the exterior walls as well as elsewhere in the structure. The capital stock was $100,000. Members of the first board of directors were Abner Taylor and Charles B. Farwell, of Cook County, Illinois; Amos C. Babcock, of Fulton County, Illinois; and John T. Brackenridge, Gustav Wilke,qqv A. P. Wooldridge, and W. D. Williams, all of Austin. In 1884 the railroad built six miles of track between Kouns and the quarry at Oatmanville at a cost to the building contractor of $35,000 for grading and bridging, while the International and Great Northern spent $24,100 for rails and cross-ties. Before the end of 1884 nearly 280,000 cubic feet of limestone had been delivered from the Oatmanville quarry. The line was abandoned and the rails removed in 1888.”
Oak Hill, Texas (Travis County) by Vivian Elizabeth Smyrl
Oak Hill, on U.S. Highway 290 and Williamson Creek, eight miles southwest of Austin in southwestern Travis County, was originally called Live Oak Springs. In 1865 an attempt was made in the community to establish a town called Shiloh, but the effort was unsuccessful. Schools called Live Oak and Oatmanville also gave their names to the community for a time. A post office called Oak Hill was established in 1870 with Swen M. Berryman as postmaster. When the new state Capitolqv building was constructed in Austin in the 1880s, the Oak Hill community boomed because of its nearby stone quarries. In 1884 the town had a general store, four saloons, and seventy-five residents; pecans, cotton, wool, and hides were the principal commodities shipped by area farmers. By 1904 the population of Oak Hill had reached 200. The Oak Hill post office was discontinued in 1910, and mail for the community was sent to Austin. In the 1970s and 1980s the population of Oak Hill was listed at 425. By 2000 the community had been absorbed into the Austin city limits. Numerous streets and businesses still identified the area as Oak Hill. A local newspaper, the Oak Hill Gazette, was published weekly.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Mary Starr Barkley, History of Travis County and Austin, 1839-1899 (Waco: Texian Press, 1963). John J. Germann and Myron Janzen, Texas Post Offices by County (1986).
Galveston Longshoremen’s Strike of 1920 by James C. Maroney
“Tensions grew amid rumors that the city’s deep-sea longshoremen might join the strike in sympathy with the coastwise dockworkers. On June 7 the governor declared martial law and sent in 1,000 national guard troops. Although deep-sea longshoremen never joined the strike, the possibility of their doing so, along with the presence of the rangers and state militiamen, the prevailing racial tension, and sporadic confrontations between strikers and nonunion dockworkers all added to the tension. The Mallory line also brought in Mexican workers in such numbers that the president of the Galveston Trades Council complained of “a regular Mexican colony” on west Galveston Island.
The city commissioners, the Galveston Dock and Marine Council, and the state’s labor press all argued that the true reason behind Governor Hobby’s decision to order troops to Galveston and to keep them there after the tension cooled was to destroy union effectiveness and to guarantee an open-shop labor market. In July Hobby suspended the mayor, city commissioners, and police force for failing to maintain the peace and protect citizens. The police were disarmed, and Gen. Jacob F. Woltersqv took control of the courts and jails. The mayor, city attorney, and commissioners could perform routine duties but retained no powers to enforce penal laws. The city commissioners filed a suit against Governor Hobby, General Wolters, and the Texas National Guard,qv but the case was dismissed by Judge Robert C. Street of the Fifty-sixth District Court. The strike-induced martial law was challenged by a private citizen, who, after being arrested for a traffic violation, brought suit in a federal district court questioning the constitutionality of martial law in Galveston; the court, however, upheld Hobby’s action in the matter. Ultimately, negotiations between city and state governments resulted in the withdrawal of the national guard at midnight, September 30, 1920, but some Texas Rangers remained until January 1921 to supervise the Galveston police department.
The Galveston ILA locals returned to work between December 1920 and July 1921 with a pay increase far below that demanded in March 1920.”
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).
Beginning with … Quatermass & the Pit, aka Five Million Years to Earth!
“The ufo phenomenon exists in a synergistic cybernetic interface with humanity. Whatever the true nature of UFOs, they interact with us within several different milieus, all of which are influenced by the media and culture. This media and culture in turn feeds back into the phenonomenon in a continuous cycle.If the fantastic fictions of our television and print media can feedback upon and influence our images and ideas of the unknown then we will continue to have a harder and harder time of sorting the wheat from the chaff of non-human intelligences communicating through the ufo encounter.
Therefore it is very important that we look at some of the various ways the subject of UFOs and Aliens have been handled by the film and television industries. Each night’s selection of films delves into these issues areas especially as they relate to that day’s particular event theme.”
– SMiles Lewis (circa 2001) 38th annual National UFO Conference www.NUFOC.com
Five Million Years To Earth (1967)
aka Quatermass & The Pit
By Nigel Kneale
“Was the Devil really a Martian? Could our predatory nature be the result of a eugenics experiment performed on our ancestors by aliens millions of years ago? These are the questions raised after an ancient spaceship is unearthed in the London Underground, and Professor Quatermass must answer them before the world is torn apart in a Martian race war. Based on the popular BBC sci-fi t.v. series.”
For more information on Five Million Years To Earth…
Carpenter’s script assembles elements of his earlier films in a kind of survey; especially Precinct 13’s siege setting and hordes from out of the demimonde, and The Thing’s shapeless, body-claiming alien force. The writing is good, littered with funny lines and highly imaginative contemporary twists on the tale’s origins in the works of Nigel Kneale, to whom Carpenter pays nod-wink homage by billing the screenplay as the work of “Martin Quatermass”.
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.
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.
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- 
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 
After giving myself the tour, getting bitten by mosquitoes, sweating profusely in the still sweltering early October humidity, and falling on my rear end from the tallest mound of rocks, I finally gave my comments to the cameraman. It is a very awkward thing to be speaking to the space beside a cameraman’s head as if there were an interviewer there, let alone having to incorporate the questions they want you to answer into the wording of those answers. I reported the fact that I and my colleagues at the Anomaly Archives lending library of the Scientific Anomaly Institute could find no documented incidents of anything mysterious or paranormal associated with the street, just its interesting history as a probable torturous work environment for the inmate labor and the subsequent rumors of buried convicts. I explained, as did James Bankston, how tales of extreme distress, often associated with tragedies, are generally accepted as the instigators of much paranormal activity. I explained how it could be possible that there are in fact actual stories of hauntings being handed down from person to person, generation to generation, just waiting to be recorded into official catalogs of the paranormal literature. I spoke of the Fortean Name Game and how so often strange and scary sounding place names such as Diablo are given for places with a history of strange phenomena. But of course the editors of this ultra-compressed 2 minute segment managed to squeeze in the one moment where I alluded to the fact that I’ve “been hearing that there is in fact paranormal activity associated with Convict Hill Road.” I was alluding to the general belief in the possibilities of such stories existing as had been implied by the “Streets of Fear” associate producer, by the bored videocamera-wielding teenagers out ghost-hunting and by the local paranormal group I’d encountered just as I entered the park. It’s possible there could be buried convict bodies somewhere under the thousand acres of now surburbanized homes and that the souls of said departed could be haunting the lives of the living but have yet to officially report there plague of poltergeists. However, if such encounters have happened, noone has bothered to document them in any formal way.
