A few rare (non-existent, actually) Fortean comics

 

With a little help from Bing's AI image creator, here's a selection of retro-fortean comics of the "never really existed but should have" variety. To start with, pictured above are two issues of The Fortean Four, in their original 1970s incarnation on the left, and the 1990s reboot on the right.

I thought the AI understood "1990s comic-book style" much better than "1970s", so I stuck with 1990s for subsequent attempts. After all, 1990s is still pretty "retro" to most people, even though it doesn't always seem like it to me!

Next up, a couple of issues of another non-existent super-team, The Ufologists. To me, the word "ufologist" conjures up a particular image that isn't terribly flattering (not quite a synonym of "ineffectual fantasist", but somewhere along those lines). So rather than using my own mental image, I went for something closer to the way I imagine ufologists picture themselves. Here's the result:

The AI tool I use has the great advantage of being free, but it does have a number of limitations compared to its more expensive rivals. For one thing it only produces square images, so they have to be stretched or cropped to fit the space available. Another problem is that it has no memory from one image to another, so you can't ask it to draw the same group of characters a second time. So I was pleasantly surprised that the two Ufologists covers could almost portray the same trio of protagonists (allowing for a change of cover artist).

Perhaps the biggest problem (mental health wise) with having a free tool that can produce any picture you ask for, all in a matter of seconds, is forcing yourself to stop playing with it! With a major effort of self-discipline, though, I limited myself to just one more experiment - The Bigfoot Hunters, pictured below. Again, there's a kind of consistency between the two images, particularly in the way Bigfoot himself is portrayed (and, at a pinch, you could say the solitary human character in the second image is the same as the central figure from the first one).

A little box of Bigfoot relics

Pictured above is a rather unusual Bigfoot-related item I happened to spot on an episode of Baggage Battles on the Travel Channel last weekend. It appears to be some kind of sideshow gimmick or stage prop (it’s too deliberately phony to call it a “hoax”). There are a couple more pictures below, but first I’ll explain the context.

I hardly ever watch TV these days, and when I do it’s often low-budget “factual” programmes on high-numbered channels that most people never bother with. Baggage Battles is a case in point. It features a group of people who attend auctions around America (and sometimes elsewhere) buying up the oddest items they can find, and then getting them independently valued. There used to be a similar show on British TV, and it was rubbish. The antique dealers were real antique dealers, the auctions were real auctions, and the end-customers were real end-customers. Boring, boring, boring. If I wanted real-life, I wouldn’t switch on the TV, would I? Baggage Battles is fake from beginning to end, but it’s really good escapist entertainment – which is exactly what TV should be.

This particular episode (season 5 episode 5, called “Burial Expenses”) was set in Providence, Rhode Island – and was even more “fake” than usual. All the auction lots were horror-related novelties, from sideshow items to movie props. The weirdest item was a small framed object that appeared to be a tattooed human nipple. You can see it on YouTube if you want to (and I bet you do): just click here.

At the start of that clip, you can just see one of the buyers, Valérie-Jeanne Mathieu, winning a lot at $275 (actually that figure is meaningless, since the under-bidder was fellow cast member Billy Leroy trying to give her a hard time, rather than a genuine bidder). Although you can’t see it in the video clip, that particular item is the “Bigfoot kit”. At the end of the show Valérie gets it appraised by a local Bigfoot expert, Dina Palazini, who puts its value around $400 – although she doesn’t explain what it is (other than confirming the obvious fact that it’s not real).

The label inside the lid has a still from the Patterson-Gimlin film, together with an inscription saying “Cryptozoologist Roger M. Allen, Chief Investigator, has found long sought after evidence that a so-called Bigfoot (Gigantopithecus) does in fact exist. New DNA, a small finger digit and hair samples conclude positive results.” There is also a date, 1999. Inside the box there are two small glass jars, one labelled “hair sample – human/animal hybrid” and the other, containing what appears to be a finger, labelled “unknown being – possible human hybrid”.

I deciphered those inscriptions from a set of HD screenshots that Paul Jackson was kind enough to send me. One of them was shown above, and here are two more. First, a clearer view inside the box:

… and a close-up of the “finger”, when Billy was inspecting it earlier in the show:

Arrgh! Bigfoot

Here is another comic I tracked down on eBay after seeing a cover image on Tumblr. Like Man-Gods from Beyond the Stars this one dates from 1975, when I was buying a lot of Marvel comics. However, it’s another case of “faux nostalgia”, since it isn’t one I owned at the time (in fact I don’t recall seeing any issues of Arrgh! before).

As it turns out, the cover (by Alfredo Alcala) is by far the best thing about the comic – not just for the layout, but for the promise of an intriguing “Bigfoot-hunting” scenario. Unfortunately the cover bears very little relation to the interior story – “Beauty and the Bigfoot”, written by Don Glut and drawn by Mike Sekowsky (as you can see from the sample below, the setting and characters – and artistic style – are completely different).

The story (just 7 pages long) is a slight one, about a Bigfoot falling in love with a human female. The latter, despite already being married, quite enjoys the situation. While the set-up has distinct possibilities, the Comics Code stamp on the cover means that Bigfoot has to keep his trousers on (probably the only time you’ll ever see Bigfoot wearing trousers, in fact). The only positive thing I can say about “Beauty and the Bigfoot” is that it’s better than the other two stories in the comic (“Rat Reborn” and “The Mummy Walks” – the latter being a recycled political satire from the 1950s that wouldn’t have made much sense in 1975, let alone now).

I still think it’s a great cover, though.

Bigfoot on Parson's Creek

Here is a retro-Fortean novel with a difference. It wasn’t written in the 1960s, and it isn’t a pastiche of the 60s style. But it’s set in the 60s, and it takes the reader back to a time when the subject of Bigfoot was a lot newer and fresher than it is today. On Parson’s Creek, written by Richard Sutton last year, is told from the present-day perspective of a grandfather recalling events that took place when he was a teenager in 1967. The book probably isn’t as well known among cryptozoologists as it ought to be, because it’s marketed as a Young Adult novel – aimed at readers the same age as the protagonist was when the events occurred. But I found the book equally gripping, even though I was closer to that age in 1967 than I am today!

On Parson’s Creek is a very clever story, and a refreshing change from all the usual clichés of Bigfoot fiction. The basic concept of the novel sets two major challenges for the author, which he then proceeds to solve in a surprisingly effortless way (it surprised me, anyhow).

The first big challenge is the 1960s setting. Of course, that does simplify things in some ways, because there was far less cultural baggage associated with Bigfoot then than there is today – no childishly bickering squatchers versus skeptics, no endless cycle of student hoaxes on YouTube, no urban legends, no internet memes. “Reality TV” is mentioned in the initial framing scene, while the main story refers to Ivan Sanderson’s book on the Yeti and the Patterson-Gimlin film (which was brand new at the time)... but that’s it. Aside from that, the protagonist has a clean slate to work with, free from socio-cultural preconceptions.

So why do I say the 60s setting is a challenge for the writer? It’s obvious if you think about it. Despite all the reality shows and YouTube videos, Bigfoot is just as much a mystery today as it was then. So we know, from our present-day perspective, that the story can’t end with the public outing of Bigfoot as a giant bipedal hominid (which would be the standard ending for a story set in the present or near-future). So how does On Parson’s Creek end? With my limited imagination, I could only think of two rather disappointing outcomes: either the supposed Bigfoot sightings would turn out to be a Scooby-Doo style hoax, designed to keep inquisitive teenagers from discovering criminal activity of some form or another, or the whole thing would end with a vague, open question: Was it Bigfoot or wasn’t it? I’m pleased to say, though, that Richard Sutton manages to come up with a more satisfying resolution than either of those!

The other challenge becomes apparent in the first pages of the novel. This is a hyper-realistic narrative, not a work of escapist fiction. To be honest, this put me off a bit at first. As regular readers will be aware, I have very little patience with anything except escapist fiction! But again, the author makes it work, and it’s the avoidance of all the usual escapist tropes that gives the novel its impressively fresh feel. The protagonist doesn’t just plunge straight into a search for Bigfoot, which then occupies him single-mindedly for a few days before reaching a dramatic climax. Yes, he investigates local Bigfoot rumours – not just by physical exploration but by talking to people and reading books – but it’s something he does on and off, over a period of months, in between other more mundane activities. There are other local mysteries, too – such as forgotten industrial relics and decades-old tragedies no-one wants to talk about – which may or may not have a connection with Bigfoot. Perhaps the most “realistic” aspect (for anyone who can remember being a frustrated teenager) is the way all the adults tell conflicting accounts of the same events – all with equal apparent sincerity!

There are a number of subplots running through the novel, including one relating to the protagonist’s fascination with Newtonian physics. This sits rather awkwardly with the broader narrative, but it really appealed to me because I too was a big fan of Isaac Newton as a teenager. And I still am... my book Pocket GIANTS: Isaac Newton is out tomorrow!

More Bigfoot Sleaze

As you can see from the photo, I’ve been reading Bigfoot porn again. Or for the first time, actually, since my only previous encounter with Bigfoot porn was an art-house movie called The Geek. There is a novel called The Geek, which is equally arty, but that’s chicken porn, not Bigfoot porn (go back and re-read Two Geeks, a Chicken and Bigfoot if you’re confused).

The book I was just reading is Cum For Bigfoot by Virginia Wade. This was originally released in instalments as self-published ebooks, and the author reportedly earns $30,000 per month from the series. That was the reason (the only reason, honestly) why I bought the book – I wanted to see if I could work out what her secret is. All my self-published ebooks added together struggle to make $3 per month, and some of them haven’t sold a single copy.

If Ms. Wade does have a secret, then I reckon it’s KISS. I don’t mean “kiss” as in lovey-dovey romance (of which the book has mercifully little), but the too-often-ignored principle of “Keep It Simple, Stupid”. If you keep things simple, you don’t make mistakes... and mistakes are what readers notice. Who wants complexity in a porn novel, anyway? By avoiding complexity, and avoiding mistakes, Cum for Bigfoot comes pretty close to perfection (I only spotted 4 typos in 217 pages). Of course it’s a very simplistic, unambitious perfection – but I guess that’s what readers want, and it explains why the series has become such a bestseller.

There are a lot of things you might expect to see in a book of this length which simply aren’t there. The plot is completely linear and uncomplicated – there’s no foreshadowing, no twists, no forks, no flashbacks. There is no technobabble – you might expect a know-it-all character to act as the author’s mouthpiece, recounting little-known facts about Bigfoot at every opportunity... but there isn’t anyone like that. There aren’t any eccentric characters at all – no goths or emos or punks or hippies, or half-crazed Bigfoot hunters, or money-grabbing sideshow entrepreneurs. No-one turns out to be anything other than what they appear to be on first appearance.

That last paragraph may sound negative, but it isn’t really. Those are the kind of things I’d try to squeeze into the story... but I wouldn’t do them very well, so the book would just sit there not getting bought. Even if a really good writer tackled the book that way, then I bet most of the people who’ve been buying Cum for Bigfoot wouldn’t like the result. All those things force the reader to slow down and think – which isn’t what someone who buys this sort of book wants.

I’ve repeatedly described the book as “porn”, not erotica, because that’s what it is. The sex scenes are long and detailed, while the linking narrative is simple and easy-to-follow. The characters are pretty generic, so most female readers (who I guess are the book’s target audience) will be able to identify with them. The description of Bigfoot society, and how they manage to remain undetected, is credible but minimalistic, with no gratuitous detail or attempts at pseudo-erudition.

So why is the book such a success? As far as I can see, it all comes down to the fact that Ms. Wade knows her audience... and knows how to give them exactly what they want.

The Science of Bigfoot

In an earlier post this year, Patterson-Gimlin Film: Fake or Fact?, I reviewed one of the ebooks in the Cryptid Casebook series from Bretwalda Books. Most of the titles in this series are written by Larry Jaffer, and – as the name suggests – consist of specific case studies. A couple of months ago, however, Bretwalda editor Rupert Matthews asked me if I would like to write something on “aspects of Bigfoot other than sightings”. I thought this was a great idea, and The Science of Bigfoot was the result.

Here is the book’s blurb:

For many Bigfoot enthusiasts, science has becomes synonymous with knee-jerk debunking. But to ignore science altogether is to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If Bigfoot is a real flesh-and-blood creature, and not some kind of paranormal apparition, there is ultimately no alternative to approaching the subject in a scientific way. The aim of this ebook is to explain what that means in simple everyday terms. From anatomy and adaptation, through ecology and evolution, to DNA analysis and the laws of physics – here in one small package is everything you need to know about the science of Bigfoot!

I’m a scientist, and I would really like Bigfoot to exist. I have to admit it’s not very likely, based on the lack of hard, unambiguous evidence. But I get annoyed when skeptics say things like “Bigfoot is a scientific impossibility” – I simply don’t believe that’s true. I don’t think there are any ecological, evolutionary or physiological reasons why a large, bipedal hominid couldn’t exist in the world today.

At the other extreme, it’s not really true to say, as many Bigfoot believers do, that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”. The more you look for something and fail to find it, the less likely it is that it’s there to be found. But ultimately you can never prove a negative – absence of evidence is not PROOF of absence.

The screaming headline “DNA Study Proves Bigfoot Never Existed” in Time Magazine a few months ago was simply wrong – an ignorant misunderstanding of the scientific method. Proving that a selection of hair samples came from known species merely proves that those specific samples didn’t come from Bigfoot. That’s a far cry from disproving the existence of Bigfoot.

If Bigfoot does exist, why is physical evidence so hard to come by? One possible explanation is that the species has evolved a kind of “prime directive” to stay out of sight of homo sapiens. As a member of the hominid family, Bigfoot is likely to be of comparable intelligence and resourcefulness to humans – possibly even superior in some ways – so who knows what they might be capable of?

As I said earlier, I would like Bigfoot to exist, although I don’t think it’s likely. It’s a subject everyone will have their own views on. But whether you’re a skeptic or a believer, you’re bound to find food for thought in The Science of Bigfoot. It’s available in Kindle format for just $2.99 from Amazon.com, or for corresponding prices from other national branches of Amazon (currently £1.92 at Amazon.co.uk, for example).

Patterson-Gimlin Film: Fake or Fact?

The subject of Bigfoot – the existence or non-existence thereof – is a complex and thorny one. It’s also a highly emotive subject, as last week’s BBC documentary demonstrated. It’s an emotive subject in Bigfoot’s home territory of North America, anyhow. The strongest reason for believing in something is having seen it with your own eyes... and thousands of Americans say they’ve done just that. People who haven’t seen Bigfoot – and that includes most people on this side of the Atlantic – are more likely to be skeptical: “If you can’t produce physical evidence, then it doesn’t exist.” Personally, though, I prefer to keep an open mind.

Of the few things that come close to providing “physical evidence” of Bigfoot, the Patterson-Gimlin Film (PGF) from 1967 is among the best known and most thoroughly analysed. I just read a new ebook on the subject – Patterson-Gimlin Film: Fake or Fact? by Larry Jaffer. I hadn’t come across Larry Jaffer before, but he’s written several of these short ebooks under the general heading of “Cryptid Casebook”. Other titles in the series include Bigfoot in Michigan, The Beast of Bodmin and Marozi: Africa's Spotted Lion. These ebooks are short (equivalent to 20 – 30 pages of a printed book) but astonishingly cheap – less than a dollar each!

I found Patterson-Gimlin Film: Fake or Fact? to be intelligently written and thought-provoking. The title, of course, goes right to the heart of the matter. While many of the other video clips purporting to show Bigfoot may have innocent, down-to-earth explanations (e.g. a bear), that simply isn’t the case with the PGF. The footage either shows an unknown bipedal primate, or it shows a human being dressed up in a costume.

There’s an awful lot that Larry Jaffer could have put in his ebook but didn’t, presumably for reasons of space. There’s only a brief mention of the numerous detailed analyses of the video that can be found on YouTube and elsewhere. There’s nothing at all about the various claims, made long after the film itself, by people who allegedly helped Patterson and Gimlin stage a hoax. So if you’re looking for a complete, up-to-the-minute account of the entire PGF saga then this little ebook is going to fall short of your expectations. The author’s aim is more limited than that – but what he does do, he does very well.

Essentially this is a book about circumstantial evidence in and around the “scene of the crime”. It doesn’t concern itself with things people may have said decades later, or with state-of-the-art image processing techniques. It just looks at the facts of the case as they unfolded at the time, and asks “Is it likely that things would have happened this way if Patterson and Gimlin had set out to perpetrate a hoax?”

I don’t like giving out spoilers, but I was sufficiently surprised by Larry Jaffer’s conclusion that I’m going to repeat it here: “So far as this writer is concerned the circumstantial evidence surrounding the Patterson-Gimlin Film indicates that it is not a fake nor a hoax, but is a genuine film of a Bigfoot.”

What makes him say that? You’ll have to splurge 99 cents on his book if you want to find out!

Two Geeks, a Chicken and Bigfoot

The Geek by Alice Louise Ramirez was originally published in 1969 by Essex House – a short lived imprint that specialized in pornographic science fiction. It sounded like something I ought to read. I’ve got a professional interest in pornographic SF stories featuring geeks, since I just wrote one myself (it’s called Chinese Alchemy, and it's published by JMS books). The original edition of The Geek is an expensive collector’s item, but I managed to get hold of the 1995 reprint pictured above (for some reason this edition gives the author’s name as “Tiny Alice”).

It wasn’t what I was expecting. I’ve belatedly discovered that the word “geek” is really just a synonym of “freak”, and it used to be applied to sideshow performers. The Geek in this novel is a kind of sword-swallower, but as well as swallowing a sword his act also entails swallowing a chicken. This might not sound a big deal – except that it’s a live chicken, that goes all the way down and comes all the way back up again... and lives to perform the same act day after day. This requires considerable skill on the part of the Geek, but even more skill on the part of the chicken – who is the real hero of the novel, and its first-person narrator.

The book has a testimonial on the cover from Philip José Farmer, and a dedication inside “To Harlan Ellison and Norman Spinrad who thought of the Geek”. Farmer, Ellison and Spinrad were three of the biggest names in science fiction at the time the book was written. Its communal genesis is described by Alice Ramirez herself in her Amazon review of the book.

If the author’s recollections are anything to go by, the story was concocted by a group of horny youngsters who were stoned out of their minds. Having read the book, that’s easy enough to believe. Most of the action takes place on a tiny Pacific island occupied by a group of sado-masochistic lesbian nudists. Considering the story is narrated by a pink chicken (I should have mentioned that this particular chicken is dyed pink, for symbolic reasons) it isn’t that bad – but it isn’t that good either. The surreal humour of the novel probably seemed a lot funnier in the drug-addled sixties.

While I was researching the book’s background I came across a strange coincidence. A film with the same title – The Geek – was released two years later in 1971. But as far as I can tell, it’s completely unconnected to the novel – the “geek” in the movie is a wild Bigfoot-like creature with a penchant for human females. Unlike the book, the film is important enough to have its own Wikipedia article. Loren Coleman also wrote about The First Bigfoot Porn Film on his blog a few years ago... although Loren was talking about a shortened 15 minute version released in 1981.

The 1971 original was 45 minutes long, and after a bit of Googling I found an uncut copy on one of those “adult” versions of YouTube. I really needn’t have bothered. The first 35 minutes is completely plotless – a fly-on-the-wall documentary about a group of horny young hikers. Bigfoot – or rather the Geek – only turns up in the last ten minutes, and his scenes mostly consist of simulated sexual activity. I couldn’t work out if the film was a cynical attempt to make money, on the basis that anything with copulation in it will sell, or if it was an experimental art-house film in the “Blair Witch” mould. It doesn’t really matter, since the effect is pretty much the same either way.

The most interesting thing, of course, is the synchronicity of a 1969 pornographic SF novel called The Geek, and an apparently unrelated 1971 pornographic SF movie called The Geek. It may just be a coincidence – but if so, why was the film called “The Geek”? If they wanted people to go and see it, why didn’t they give it a more commercially eyecatching title like “Bigfoot” or “Sasquatch”? Another possibility occurred to me – admittedly on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. Maybe the film-makers were such big fans of the novel they told everyone they were going to make a movie of The Geek – and then realized it was totally unfilmable within their budget. So they decided to make an easier movie with the same title instead.

Bigfoot, Richard III and Outsider Science

Last month saw not one but two major news stories revolving around the subject of DNA analysis. In America, there was the long-awaited publication of the Bigfoot DNA results, first announced in a press release in November last year. In Britain, there was the just as eagerly anticipated announcement that the remains unearthed in Leicester last September are indeed those of King Richard III, who was killed at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485.

At first sight, the latter might appear to fall squarely in the domain of mainstream academia, but this isn’t the case at all. The discovery of Richard III’s remains was as much a product of “Outsider Science” as the Bigfoot DNA study. The search was funded and motivated by amateur enthusiasts who (like the Bigfoot hunters) set out with an emotionally-charged agenda to prove a particular theory – an approach that is, of course, anathema to professional scientists. And the way the Richard III hunters went about their quest was unorthodox to say the least, as was the way they announced their results to the public. Yet in spite of all of this, no-one seriously disputes that they found exactly what they claim to have found. This is in stark contrast to the Bigfoot DNA study, which ever since the results were announced has been the target of intense criticism from all sides. Sometimes Outsider Science works, more often it doesn’t. I thought it might be instructive to compare the two cases in a bit more detail.

Like (I suspect) many other non-Americans, I’m not particularly interested in Bigfoot, and I’m constantly surprised at how passionate some people can become when discussing the subject. It’s a bit like ufology – not just an emotional battlefield between believers and skeptics, but between believers in one theory and believers in a rival theory. In fact, the most vitriolic criticism of Melba Ketchum’s DNA study has come not from mainstream scientists (who have generally ignored it) but from within the Bigfoot community. Much of the vitriol has focused on the way the results were made public before they had appeared in a peer-reviewed journal, which is held up as “not the way science works” (I’m not convinced this is true – see this Wikipedia article for a counterexample). When the full results were finally published last month, the journal in question turned out to be one that no-one had heard of, leading to allegations of vanity publishing.

The reason Dr Ketchum’s paper wasn’t published in a more respectable journal is, simply, that all the respectable journals turned it down. The paranoid conspiracy explanation for this would be that the scientific community is out to suppress anything done by independently-funded researchers working outside mainstream academia, and/or anything suggesting that there might be a living hominin species other than homo sapiens. But I don’t believe that. If Dr Ketchum’s samples had turned out to have mitochondrial DNA identical to a modern human (which they did), and nuclear DNA that was non-human, but closer to human than a chimpanzee or bonobo, I’m sure the mainstream journals would have fallen over themselves to get it into print. But to say “the Sasquatch genomes were novel and fell well outside of known ancient hominin as well as ape sequences” suggests that what we have here is a new kind of hybrid outside the accepted laws of zoology and genetics. It’s easier to assume that the nuDNA (unlike the mtDNA) was too badly degraded to allow a proper analysis... and I bet that’s what all those peer reviewers who turned the paper down assumed.

If the Bigfoot DNA study has a flaw, it will be found in the science and not (as a lot of the criticism has dwelt on) the way the results were announced to the world. Ten days before the Ketchum paper was published, the results of the Richard III dig were announced... not in a peer-reviewed journal, but in a morning press conference followed by a documentary on Channel 4 later the same day. On the face of it, that’s not a particularly professional way to go about things – an impression that was borne out by the documentary itself, which showed that at least some of the researchers were amateur enthusiasts motivated by a passion for their subject rather than professional detachment. That’s not a bad thing, of course (“amateur” comes from the French word for “love”, not “incompetence”), but it’s certainly unorthodox.

Ironically, most of what I know about orthodox archaeology comes from another Channel 4 series, Time Team. They often make the point that real archaeology is about ordinary, low-status individuals – the sort of people you can’t learn about from the history books. As a general rule, archaeologists aren’t very interested in the world of Kings and Queens. This was strikingly expressed in a recent episode when it was said that, to a real archaeologist, finding a low-value copper coin is far more exciting than finding a high-value gold coin. Or to put it another way, archaeologists hate treasure-hunters... and looking for a dead King of England is arguably the ultimate in treasure-hunting!

The Richard III dig set out to do something that was unthinkable to most serious archaeologists. There’s nothing wrong in excavating the site of a mediaeval priory... unless the sole purpose is a “treasure hunt” for one particular tomb. And that was unashamedly the case here. As soon as the body was found, the exercise switched from an archaeological dig to a forensic exhumation. The identification of the skeleton as that of Richard III was pretty strong even without DNA analysis, based on its age, gender, archaeological context, distinctive pathology (spinal deformity and battlefield wounds) and radiocarbon dating. In fact, the DNA analysis wasn’t complete at the time the announcement was made, having been limited to a comparison of the mtDNA with two living maternal descendants. Dr Turi King, the geneticist who carried out the study, was quoted in New Scientist as saying “As a scientist I would have preferred to finish the analysis, but I know the answer isn't going to change”. I’m sure she’s right, but I have the feeling that if Melba Ketchum had said the same thing she wouldn’t have been allowed to get away with it!

The discovery of Richard III’s burial site is one of the great triumphs of Outsider Science. It proves that when it’s done properly (and given a fair amount of luck) it really can come up with the goods. Sadly, successes like this are quickly appropriated by the mainstream, and people forget they were initiated by “outsiders” who were originally viewed as crackpots. In fact, they still would be viewed as crackpots, if the trench had been dug just half a metre from where it was – in which case the body would never have been found! That was the fate of another (superficially very similar) enterprise last month, when a group of amateur enthusiasts tried and failed to find a cache of WW2 aircraft they believed had been buried in Burma (Search for buried Spitfires in Burma called off).

The Mechanical Gorilla

Here is a new novelette packed with Fortean themes. It’s got cryptozoology (ghostly-seeming apemen in the woods), sinister government secrets (Cold War bunkers and Men in Black) and a gateway to a parallel universe. It even name-drops the one-and-only Nick Redfern!

I used to write quite a lot of fiction, until it dawned on me there is a lot less demand for it than there is for non-fiction. So these days I generally refrain from writing fiction – unless, that is, I’m presented with a challenge I just can’t resist. That’s what happened a few years ago with The Case of the Invisible College and Other Mysteries (the challenge in that case being to come up with a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Inspector Morse)... and it happened again at the end of last year.

In this case the source of the challenge was Peni Griffin’s excellent Idea Garage Sale blog. Anyone who is interested in creative writing and has never come across Peni’s blog really ought to check it out. It’s exactly what the title says... or perhaps not exactly, since “garage sale” suggests you have to pay for the ideas – in fact they’re free with no strings attached! Last November, Peni did a couple of posts based on news stories she’d seen in Fortean Times magazine – The Mechanical Gorilla and Roadside Bigfoot. It struck me these could easily be two scenes from the same story – my initial thoughts on the subject can be seen in the comments to the “Roadside Bigfoot” post.

Once I’d started thinking about it, I realized I could merge in various other ideas that were at the back of my mind – Nick Redfern’s theories about the nature of British “apeman” sightings, and my fascination with Cold War politics and secret underground installations. Mix in some convincing-sounding technobabble and an old-fashioned beginning-middle-end plot, and The Mechanical Gorilla was the result!

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a big fan of the wacky world of A. E. van Vogt, one of the most popular science fiction authors of the 1940s. It’s often said that van Vogt wrote his stories in scenes of 800 to 1000 words, each of them introducing a new and totally unexpected sci-fi twist. I’m not convinced van Vogt really used this technique as rigorously as some people claim... but I’ve always wanted to try my hand at it! I finally got a chance to do just that in this story – ten short chapters of a thousand words each. I won’t spoil things by giving away the twist introduced in each chapter, but you can get a flavour of things from the (deliberately pulp-style) chapter headings:

1. On The Trail of the Apemen
2. Cryptic Visitors
3. Encounter in the Woods
4. A Transdimensional Portal
5. Idol of the Apemen
6. The Soviet Connection
7. Secrets of the Cold War
8. Astounding Revelations
9. Prisoners of the Apemen
10. The Mechanical Gorilla

The Mechanical Gorilla is currently available in Kindle format from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk, and should eventually be available on iTunes and Nook as well (ISBN 978-1-291-29955-7). The “cover image” at the top of this post is the first one I produced, which I thought was very artistic. However it was rejected by the Kindle system because the contrast was too low! The final version (seen on the Amazon site) is more garish, although it does work better at thumbnail size. The Japanese text in the image is supposed to read gorira robotsu, which is the closest I could get to “gorilla robot”... but with my luck it probably means something rude!