Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. Look for new installments Wednesday and Friday…

This week, I want to talk about the rumors and assumptions surrounding snuff films, and the supposedly booming black market that creates and distributes them. First things first, though, we need to look at how most folks define snuff in order to understand one of the core truths about it – Snuff doesn’t not exist because of the limits of human greed or depravity; snuff doesn’t exist because of the limits of its definition.

The verbal dances we undertake in attempting to nail down specific definitions for broadly understood, but taxonomically elusive, phenomena like pornography have nothing on the addendum-flinging rumba that people perform in pinning down snuff films. In this sense, snuff is the opposite of the former example – the struggle to dogmatically codify pornography is an exercise in encapsulating an ever-expanding set of subjectivities as they relate to the perceptions and intentions of both producer and consumer. Porn can encapsulate anything from video recordings of fully exposed penetrative intercourse to a photograph of a person’s bare feet. The working definition of a “snuff film” is so ludicrously specific as to systematically eliminate every known snuff-like recording from the mass hypothetical understanding of what constitutes true snuff.

Snuff started out as a fairly open-ended term. First used by author Ed Sanders in his 1971 true crime book “The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion,” the term “Snuff films” was used to describe an alleged series of violent (possibly murderous) home movies shot by Manson and his acolytes. Though no footage ever surfaced, the term caught on and became a catch-all label for any video recording depicting the actual murder of a human being (I’ll get into the specific history and examples in Wednesday’s column).

Today, the definition has been vastly constrained by a huge honkin’ caveat:

Said murder must have been committed for the express purpose of distributing (and, according to the strictest definition, profiting from) the recorded footage.

Click AFTER THE JUMP for the rest!

(more…)

Re: Changelings – I’ve got good news and bad news.

The bad news is that, if your kid was covertly swapped for an aging elf or weird, magical stick, you’re pretty much boned. True, there are a couple fairy tales where parents manage to wrangle their young one back from its abductors. In one Swedish story, a mother is advised to brutalize or abandon her newly acquired changeling boarder. After the woman refuses, she finds her real son wandering through the woods. He explains that his troll abductors freed him, unharmed, after witnessing the woman’s compassion toward their big-boned, slobbery offspring. Unfortunately, I would assume that this is a late edition to changeling lore, as it reads like a fanciful PSA put out by some child-welfare lobbying group trying to halt all the folklore-fueled child beatings. In all probability, the closest you’re ever going to come to getting your baby back baby back baby back is ridding your house of the magical imposter.

To humanely evict a changeling, simply brew beer, or cook stew, in a bunch of eggshells. European cultures as disparate as Spain, Wales and Germany all believed that this bizarre and seemingly random culinary display would essentially gobsmack the miniature pretender into revealing its true identity. According to the stories, the changeling will begin laughing and shout something like “I was born 100 years ago, and since then I have not seen so many egg shells near the fire!” before vanishing or jumping up the chimney. (Interestingly, the notion of changelings as far older beings than their appearance suggests extends beyond the elvish elder tales – a post-pubescent developmentally disabled teen was often feared for having the mental capacity of a child and the sexual urges of an adult. Women, especially, were afraid of being sexually assaulted by what superstition told them was a creature possessed of a hidden, ancient, and ultimately malicious, intelligence.)

The other way to give a changeling the boot was to, quite literally, give the changeling the boot. Right in its goofy face. And then whip it with a belt. And throw it in the fire. Then chug a beer and spit on everything from “The Dark Crystal.” Abuse the monster to the point where it fearfully retreats, or its mommy comes to collect it.

Ahem.

The good news is that there are plenty of ways to prevent stupid elves from sticking you with their stupid senior citizen in exchange for your stupid baby.

Martin Luther, captain of the protestant reformation and full-on panty-tossing God groupie, had a big foam finger that said “Changeling Infanticide.” He wasn’t shy about letting everyone know that a changeling was a malformed progeny of Satan’s oogy womb and, as such, was “only a piece of flesh,” soulless and fit for brutal dispatch. It’s no surprise, then, that many Protestant churches advertised Christian baptism as a great way to protect a baby from the handsy mitts of devil-humping trolls. For extra insurance against magical baby theft, Protestants recommended that a bible be placed in every child’s crib. The Catholic Church also hopped aboard the bandwagon, espousing the crucial importance of baptism, and recommending nursery decoration that included rosaries, a liberal smattering of holy water and crosses. Lots of crosses.

The most popular secular changeling prevention method? Constant vigilance. The effect of this simple advice was two-fold:

It ensured that, should a child turn out to be mentally or physically handicapped, the blame fell squarely on the mother. In an age when the mom was expected to do all the early child rearing while dad was out felling trees with his bare nuts, even the most innocuous negligence (an accidental nap, a trip to the bathroom) was seen as an open invitation to all eerie creeping things – “Free Baby! Come and F***ing Steal It!” As a result, mothers of suspected changelings were often ostracized by neighbors and abandoned by their husbands, especially if they refused to take the steps necessary (i.e., booted steps onto the changeling’s goofy face) to rid the household of the mystical blight.
On the upside, it allowed mothers to focus solely on parenting, which, in many cases, gave destitute women a well-deserved break from butt-mauling labor. People (presumably women) even began spreading stories about newborns that had been stolen after landlords had prematurely forced the recovering new mothers back to work in the fields. Score one for the ladies.

Most articles about changelings mention that if folks still credited developmental disabilities to supernatural baby trades, there’s no question that autism would be blamed on dark elves, nefarious fairies and regular trolls. I’m glad that people are past these beliefs – past the fantastical scapegoating of unlikely enemies and ready to turn to science for rational, empirically derived answers. Now we know, for example, that it’s actually evil, undetectable chemicals hidden in vaccines that cause developmental disabilities.

How far we’ve come.

Still, it’s interesting to think about how Martin Luther and Jenny McCarthy are connected by more than just a storied reputation for nailing things.

Out of all the ye olde speculations as to the motives of changeling-planting baby swappers, my favorite involves geriatric elves using human homes as unknowing assisted living facilities. Essentially, an aging elf musters up some sort of human infant glamour, gets traded off with a human child and spends his golden years playing peek-a-boo and getting ambushed by the tickle monster. No word on what the other elves did with their newly acquired human fussbudget, but if they can make an ancient elf look like a newborn baby, they can make a newborn baby look like an impressive hand-carved mahogany desk.

Another popular theory was that magical younglings needed human milk to thrive, while their birth mothers ran smoothest on squirming baby meat. The changeling would drink its fill from an oblivious human’s teat as the breastfeeding mommy’s actual child got all ate up. What’s more, stories of milk-ravenous fairies resorting to kidnapping extend beyond changeling lore – some European cultures told tales of strange creatures stealing lactating women for use as perpetual wet nurses in maternity wards of the damned. Many of the same people also theorized that a pregnant fairy required a female human midwife to assist with the birthing.

Both of these ideas hinge on the notion of human maternity – both physical (lactation) and emotional (maternal instinct/experience) – as some sort of specialized Earth magic required even by those beings with direct, mystic lines to the planet’s center. In other words, it makes women, and, by extension, humanity, an innate and integral component of nature, even as it applies to mythological eco-systems. But what’s folklore if not an opportunity for the tellers to embellish the details of their own universal significance? Regardless, Imagine having your boobs sucked down to husks by a magic cave’s worth of caterwauling fairy spawn. Or just watch some of the anime where that happens.

Then, of course, there are the people who think all the trolls, fairies and elves are just being mean. In the stories where this is the case, and the creatures are perpetrating tike exchanges just to rattle the ranks of humanity, the kidnappers hold on to their offspring and, instead, leave a stock – a magic, baby-lookin’ hunk of wood that gradually appears to sicken and die. Meanwhile, the mystical child thieves can raise the stolen baby as their slave, eat it or sell it for parts. In one Scandinavian tale, a bunch of trolls set up an arranged marriage between their changeling and a troll prince with a human fetish. There are even bittersweet stories where desperate monsters steal babies because they just want to experience the love of a child (feel free to add your own bitter quotes around the word love if you were molested by trolls or something).

All of this just so adults could feel better about punching under-aged retards. Or, as you will read about on Friday, so they could feel obligated to throw them into fires.

Friday: Changeling Prevention and Stolen Child Retrieval

All this week Matt Finley takes a look into the changeling. Look for posts Wednesday and Friday that complete his horrendous tale about tricksy elves and those unfortunate enough to be mistaken for them.

Even for 17th century Sweden, it was a strange trial. If their court testimony is to be believed, the couple didn’t intend to kill their son. Or, rather, the thing that wasn’t their son. According to them, the ailing 10-year-old being they abandoned atop a freezing heap of fermenting manure wasn’t even human. The couple did have a son, but, years earlier, he had been stolen by elves and replaced with the strange, growth-impaired elfin facsimile that had just coughed up its last breath from atop a lonely pile of animal crap. And that wasn’t the couple’s fault – the elves should have retrieved their dying offspring and, in exchange, returned the family’s rightful child.

Note that it wasn’t the parents’ story that made this trial so unusual; it was the fact that the case was brought to trial at all. Back then, in the same way that severe mental illness was often diagnosed as demon possession, birth defects and growth impairments in children carried their own mythologically charged explanation – changelings. Identifiable by their pale skin, or strange vocalizations or malformed limbs or spines, changelings were believed to be children of elves, fairies or trolls – dwindling races that used the human baby swaps to ensure nurturing upbringings for their twisted younglings. Cases of changeling neglect, abuse and murder weren’t uncommon, and certainly weren’t often prosecuted. Hell, Protestant leaders, including Martin Luther, were famously ambivalent to, sometimes even trending toward approving of, the murder of suspected changelings.

The problem was two-fold:

Scientifically speaking, diseases like Down syndrome, spina bifida, cerebral palsy and cystic fibrosis weren’t understood. Especially given that many of these disorders take months, or even years, to fully manifest, it was easy for people to believe that their once seemingly healthy child had been covertly switched with the grotesque spawn of a foreign biology. Remember: supernatural creatures were already a rich part of European – and proto-European – oral tradition. Attributing these strange maladies to these ubiquitous fantastical antagonists took only the slightest flick of Occam’s razor. Also, most changeling tales, including the one recounted above, involve a male child. It’s not a coincidence that human males are more susceptible to birth defects than females. Also, pragmatically speaking, have you ever tried to pass off a baby troll as a little girl? It’s like trying to take E.T. into Chuck E. Cheese and not get arrested.

Economically speaking, the peasant class (traditionally the most superstitious of the social castes) was poor. It’s no wonder that one of the classic marks of a changeling was a voracious, insatiable hunger. If a family was comfortable, it was because every member of that family was working their backs to the front to put food on the table. Sad as it is, an impaired child whose only physical contribution was food consumption could easily become an object of resentment, derision and, ultimately, neglect or abuse. It’d be a lot easier to rationalize such blatant dereliction of the maternal/paternal instinct if the wittle cutie were actually an insidious cuckoo placed in the residential nest by nefarious monsters.

But wait… what was the endgame for the supernatural baby traders? What kind of futile insanity did folks invest in preventing these Middle Earth switcheroos? And what happened to that Swedish couple who were tried for murdering their son?

Freaking relax. Jesus. All your questions will be answered this Wednesday and Friday.

Except that last question. I never found out what happened to them.

The adventure seekers and treasure hunters amongst you already know about the HMS Hussar, the millions of dollars in gold that she was allegedly carrying and her doomed passage through New York’s Hell Gate. If you’re like me, though, and have a standing eye-drop prescription on file at the pharmacy because your doctor got tired of writing one every time you got ranch Dorito powder all rubbed in there, you need a little background:

The Hussar was a 28-gun frigate (a warship built for speed and maneuverability) used by the British fleet during the American Revolution. In 1779, as French troops joined forces with George Washington’s soldiers just north of NYC, the Brits moved their 20-ship fleet south, instructing Charles Pole, captain of the Hussar, to transfer the army’s payroll to Long Island’s Gardiners Bay, where the Brits would continue to store provisions through the War of 1812. Pole was apparently feeling extra saucy because he decided to steer the Hussar through Hell Gate, a tidal strait in the East River known for its wacky currents, narrow berth and retarded amount of giant rocks. The decision was a definitive strategical oops.

Hell Gate, which connects the East River to Long Island Sound, got its awesome name from Dutch explorer Adriaen Block, who, in 1614, bitch-slapped the treacherous waterway right across its goofy face with a 42-foot yacht called the Onrust (Dutch for “Restless”). (Block, being a ruddy Dutchman, actually named the strait “Hellegat,” which can mean either “bright gate” or “hell gate,” but after scads of seamen lost their boats to the channel’s turbulent wiles, the latter Anglicization stuck.) Another frequently traded story of Hell Gate’s ignominious reputation is that of the General Slocum, a big bastard paddle steamship that, on June 5, 1904, was carrying 1,342 Lutherans up the East River to a Long Island church picnic when it caught fire (due to crew incompetence… not, like, Hell Gate magic or anything) and burned away into soggy carbon, incinerating 1,021 hungry Protestants in the process.

More interesting, though, is the story of Execution Rocks, a rock wall in the Hell Gate basin that’s visible during low tide and then slowly swallowed as the currents pull the water back into the strait. Legend has it that during the American Revolution, British soldiers dragged captured American patriots down into Hell Gate, lashed them to the exposed rock wall and watched as the tidal flow silenced their desperate screams. The story goes that when the Hell Gate Lighthouse was finally erected, the lighthouse’s keepers were plagued by the constant ghostly shrieking of murdered American rebels. It’s also possible that Execution Rocks is named as such due to all the horrific nautical disasters and whatnot. Nobody knows for sure. (If I had to watch a cartoon of one of those explanations, I’d want it to be the first one, but I think that’s just because in my head the lighthouse keepers are alcoholics with stumbling walks and swirling google eyes.)

Anyway, Captain Pole steered the Hussar into Hell Gate, where the ship was pinballed from rock to rock, scoring two free games before ultimately surrendering, gold and all, to the river’s hungry depths. For years afterwards, adventurous divers and Scrooge McDuckesque millionaires have braved the East River in search of the sunken treasure. Could New York’s gate to Hell actually be a stairway to Heaven? Because, like… the gold? Get it?

Even if you don’t, it doesn’t matter.

In 1876, the army Corp of Engineers began a decade-long dynamiting campaign during which thousands of pounds of explosives were used to clear the strait of its most dangerous obstacles. Later, nearby Randall’s Island and Ward’s Island were connected by a landfill and formed into a single, diaper-strewn mass. What I’m saying is, if there actually were heaps o’ gold on the Hussar, they’ve been blown up so many times, and had so much medical waste heaped on top of them, even Cash4Gold wouldn’t be interested – and they’ll accept gold teeth that are still set in a jawbone.

Frigate captains and Steamship sailors once feared the perilous corridor, referred to in hushed, reverential tones as “Hell Gate.” Today, canoeists flip U-eys all over its saggy ass. They might as well call it “Heck Gate.”

Or “Crap Alley.”

Let the kids have their evil sewer tunnels and drunken graveyard reveries. Adults have bigger things to worry about. Like giant Soviet drills. And how the giant Soviet drills are tunneling through the Earth and into hell, where the howling souls of the damned are torn apart, set on fire, sewn back together and covered in bees.

In 1989, as the decade stumbled to a close, Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), America’s Christian television goliath, reported that, according to a Finnish science journal, a Soviet deep drilling experiment had accidentally tunneled all the way to Satan’s doorstep. More than that, the shocked scientists, who watched as the drill’s temperature sensors peaked out at an extra spicy 1,100 °C, tossed a microphone down the pit and recorded a nature sounds tape worthy of a sleepless Ozzy – the noises of hell. And nothing bunches evangelical panties like the desperate wailings of the damned. (Truthfully, the recording sounds more like the pipe-and-tile-echoed rumpus at a particularly rowdy rest stop glory hole.) Some viewers were terrified, declaring it the end of times. Others were outraged, declaring it a hoax. One viewer – a puckish Norwegian tourist named Guy Rendalan – was bemused to the point of action.

As Baby New Year 1990 filled his diaper with optimistic tidings, TBN continued their coverage of the 9-mile hole to Hades, claiming that over 2,000 individuals had converted to Christianity after hearing of the chasm’s existence. This seemingly random numerical figure, which was offered during a January 29 broadcast, came with another revelation – in addition to the Finnish coverage, the network had a fully translated hard copy of a Norwegian paper’s hell drill article, which contained even more shocking details. A giant bat creature flew out of the hole! The words “I Have Conquered” were burned into the Siberian sky! The Soviet government was administering amnesia pills to everyone who witnessed the incident! This article, along with the helpful translation, had been sent directly to TBN by our impish pal Guy Rendalan.

“None of it is true. I fabricated every word of it!” explained Rendalan during an interview with TruthorFiction.com’s Rich Buhler. Rendalan, who, during his trip to America, was gob-smacked by the serious coverage of the ridiculous story, sent the article (which was actually about a community building inspector) and fake translation to TBN just see whether the network’s fact checking practices were really as, well, non-existent as they seemed.

And… they were.

As for the original article from that anonymous Finnish “science journal” – debunkers eventually tracked it backed to a Christian magazine called “Ammennusastia,” which was merely summarizing a similar story from a different Finnish paper. That paper, “Etela Soumen,” had printed its hell hole piece in a grab bag letters-from-readers section. From there, the trail continues. Savvy debunkers have sweated this paper chase all the way to a dead end at another Christian newspaper, “Jewels of Jericho,” out of f***ing California, USA.

In the end, the drill to hell is a story of doubt. The imagined fires and staged screams of that non-existent abyss suggested proof of the dark side of an afterlife that even TBN bible thumpers occasionally questioned. Why go to such stunning lengths to ignore the truth unless the lie – unattractive as it is – offers something more satisfying than integrity or credibility? In other words, unless the lie offers confirmation of an even deeper, more bibley truth. Who would’ve thought that the gaps in people’s faith could be briefly filled in by a cavernous hole?

Or that that hole would simultaneously give everyone else a sound recording packed with metal album hidden track potential.

Friday: Shipwrecked in the East River – the Real Hell Gate

There’s a cemetery in Stull, Kansas where, once a year, the devil sashays out a gate to hell and MCs a homecoming dance for the damned. There’s a drainage pipe in Clifton, New Jersey that leads to a secret network of underground corridors – corridors that wend down through earth into the accursed depths of the netherworld. There are seven evil fence gates in the forests of York, Pennsylvania that, when entered consecutively, usher the adventurous onto the plains of Hades. Why would someone want to find a doorway to the pit (aside from the outside chance of a gift shop)?

I wish I could’ve asked the 150 or so revelers who gathered in Stull’s cemetery on March 20, 1978. Or the group of TV news reporters that was ejected from the privately owned graveyard on October, 31, 2002. These rowdy gatherings of Satan-hungry looky-loos began in 1974, when The University Daily Kansan, Kansas University’s student paper, published a piece detailing the local graveyard’s nefarious reputation as one of two places (the other being somewhere in buttfrack, India) where the devil has been known to appear in-person, either on Halloween (lame) or the vernal equinox (acceptable).

According to legend, Stull, Kansas was once called Skull, Kansas (Wrong. It was called “Deer Creek Community”), and the Skull, Kansas cemetery was the site of a grisly event – a stable hand stabbed the mayor to death (Wrong. Stull has never been incorporated and, as such, has never had a mayor). Other Stull-centric legends include the birth of a deformed demon baby, now, appropriately, buried in the dread graveyard, a cornucopia of witch executions and a rumor that, in the early ‘90s, Pope John Paul II ordered a cross-country flight redirected so that the aircraft wouldn’t pass over the Kansas town’s blighted soil. (Wrong. He had the flight re-routed so he could flush the toilet over the actual evil that is Oskaloosa, Iowa.)

Stull locals regard the legends as, alternately, hokum, bunkum and snorkum (a regional idiom), while Stull tourists are convinced that the locals are just, like, saying that to cover up the truth, man. The Satanic stalemate is only furthered by the town’s zero tolerance policy for cemetery trespassers, a fact that’s been used again and again as evidence that, at least in the graveyard, folks aren’t in Kansas anymore… and the townsfolk know it.

Alternately, the answer to my question, why oh why seek a gate to hell? Humba humba hum (that’s my new single. I’m multi-tasking) could be sought out in Clifton, where the local rainwater drainage system is rumored to hold a maze of catacombs chock full o’ human remains, lit candles, medieval weaponry and even demonic sentinels. Bonus: somewhere in the labyrinth is a bona fide passage to the Inferno. Over the years, the legend has proliferated thanks to coverage in Weird New Jersey magazine and whip-it-fogged teenagers, who cover the tunnels in messy pentagrams and spray-painted “Gate to Hell” signs, including helpful arrows pointing down into the darkness. Local kids use the lengths of tunnel as a ruler for courage measurement – a folklore-enhanced pissing contest designed to organize a social hierarchy based on pipe-distance-travelled. Likewise, York County, PA’s seven gates of hell dare scared kids to charge through the very real fence gate on Trot Run Road and freak out in the woods at night – the only time when the six subsequent gates become visible to man. Pass the seventh gate, and find yourself in Lucifer’s breakfast nook.

Suffice it to say, there’s something enticing about the idea of hell as a physical place, with skirtable borders, surveyable zip codes and, most importantly, a visible town center. As such, there are innumerable stories like the above – creepy tales traded by teens in the name of reshaping familiar geography into a mysterious (but navigable), deadly (but survivable) unknown. Other legends have taken this idea even deeper, mining mortal terror from the very core of the Earth.

Wednesday: Drilling to Hell

Spine-tingling action! Tear-jerking romance! Head-scratching pseudo-science! It’s the Weird Things Lake and River Monster Round-up – an occasional roll call of aquatic serpents that gives you, the reader, three lake monsters in three days. That’s almost two a day!

Today: Utah’s Bear Lake Monster

Technically, the story of Northern Utah’s Bear Lake monster begins with the Ute Indians, who believed that the lake was infested with whole schools of Pawapicts (or “Water Babies”) – nasty little critters that lured victims out into the water and then transformed said victims into Pawapicts themselves. Really, though, it starts with journalist Joseph C. Rich, who, while prospecting feature nuggets for the Mormon-owned Deseret News, heard the Pawapict legend and thought to himself, “Zippity-Jim! I love all of it! Except the part about the Pawapicts!”

Rich’s subsequent series of articles, published starting in 1868, were headlined “Monsters in Bear Lake” and recounted the experiences of several Mormon witnesses who attested to seeing unidentifiable brown creatures tearing ass across the tranquil waterway. The pieces went on declare open season on the monsters, which Rich helpfully suggested should be captured and sold to sideshow magnate P.T. Barnum. The only problem was that Rich had fabricated the entire story. There weren’t any monsters. More than that, there weren’t any witnesses.

I don’t want to suggest that the good people of Utah are born gullible. It’s probably something in the groundwater that builds up in their fatty tissue as they age. The point is, the same folks who Joseph Smith hooked, lined and sinkered with a tale of golden plates and a new testament of Jesus Christ were likewise bamboozled by Joseph Rich’s fantastical lake monster hokum. And I mean the exact same folks. (To be fair, a 2005 Princeton study found that 75% of all Christians and 66% of non-Christians hold some paranormal beliefs.)

While returning from a religious summit in Salt Lake City, three Northbound Deseret News readers – Molando Pratt and Williams Budge and Broomstead – saw what appeared to be a very large duck. On closer inspection, though, it turned out to be the monster from Rich’s articles. It was William Budge who penned the letter to former Utah governor, and head of the Mormon Church, Brigham Young. “As there has been considerable interest excited in regard to the ‘Bear Lake Monster’ I submit a description of what we have seen thinking it might be acceptable to you.” wrote a toadying Budge after describing the creature’s not quite horsey ears, sorta-foxlike face and the space between the animal’s eyes, which “equaled that of the distance between the eyes of a common cow.” (While resoundingly apt in this particular instance, this uniquely Utahan unit of measurement can be confusing, such as when panicked tourists are informed that the nearest Emergency Room is “79 times the distance between the eyes of a common cow west of here.”)

Young, who had apparently received several other monster letters from various correspondence-happy Latter Day Saints, kicked into full “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” mode, found himself an accomplice and set out to capture the Bear Lake beast. The plan was this: Young would give his friend, fellow Mormon Phineus Cook, some rope. Cook would then use the rope to catch the monster. Profits from the monster’s sale would be split down the middle.

Rope in hand, Cook dashed off to a blacksmith’s shop to oversee the creation of a giant hook, which the dutiful Mormon then baited with a large chunk of meat and attached to Young’s half of the bargain. Using 20 feet of heavy chain, Cook attached the hooked-and-baited end of the line to a floating buoy and tied the opposite end to a tree on the shore. Suffice it to say, Cook’s unique monstering apparatus failed to attract anything more than a perturbed letter from Young, bemoaning the team’s failure and demanding return of the rope.

While the Mormon community continued to spread tales of the Bear Lake monster via shared letters and, of course, continuing coverage in the Deseret News, other Utah newspapers, including the Salt Lake Tribune, skewered Joseph Rich’s shoddy reporting and mocked both the his home paper and the Mormon community for buying into the baseless farce. Though Rich ultimately confessed that his articles were wholly fictitious, monster sightings were eventually reported from every major lake in the State of Utah. Apparently, the power of suggestion doesn’t recant with its suggester. And the Bear Lake monster? It still makes the occasional cameo in the local newspapers. Usually around Memorial Day weekend – the start of tourist season.

That leaves one final loose end – Brigham Young’s rope. I’m sorry to report that he never got it back.

Spine-tingling action! Tear-jerking romance! Head-scratching pseudo-science! It’s the Weird Things Lake and River Monster Round-up – an occasional roll call of aquatic serpents that gives you, the reader, three lake monsters in three days. That’s almost two a day!

Today: Russia’s Brosno Dragon

If I were the Brosno Dragon, I would be pissed. And not in the Stolichnaya-induced way.

In 2002, members of the Kosmopoisk research association (a large, paranormal-obsessed non-government brain trust) panty-raided Lake Brosno with echo sounding equipment and low-impact underwater explosives. If the conversation on the Kosmopoisk boat mimicked that of the Internet blogging community, dragon debunking theories – ranging from giant sturgeon to mutant beaver- clouded the cabin and deck while, beneath the water, the equipment’s hydroacoustic pulses tripped blindly over solid matter. After a time, the onboard computer indicated a strange, amorphous shape, about the size of a train car, skulking just above the floor of the 140-foot-deep lake. “That’s gotta be the most mutated beaver ever.” remarked one of the researchers as his crewmates deployed an explosive device intended to startle the mysterious blob into action.

This after all the Brosno Dragon did for its country.

In the 13th century, when the Tatar-Mongol army fanned out across Asia and Eastern Europe, conquering the Russian army and dividing the Kievan Rus’ principalities into vassal states of the Mongol horde, the city of Novgorod (now Kiev), capital of the Kievan Rus, was spared invasion. If you ask a historian (or Wikipedia, for that matter) why the fierce invaders from the east pulled a U-ey a mere 100 km from the urban hub, he or she will probably tell you that, having conquered every other major city in the region, the Mongol commanders simply didn’t want to bother trudging through the area’s outlying squishity marshity swamplands. Ask a local, and you might hear a different story:

On the way to Novgorol, big cheese Mongol Batu Khan ordered his troops to take a rest along the shores of Lake Brosno. While the soldiers massaged each other’s feet and sang songs about blood, their thirsty horses moseyed down to the water’s edge. Suddenly, the Brosno Dragon burst from the lake, his razor teeth glinting like a soon-to-be-conceived baby’s father’s eye. The dragon fed. Horses, men, armor and weapons all cowed to the creature’s monstrous deglutition, the men’s shrieks and the horses’ whinnying screams all turned to horrid gargles by the torrents of foul mucous and hot spit that forced them over the drooling cataract of the beast’s yawning gullet. As the dragon gulped down flank after flank of the Mongolian army, Batu Khan hollered orders for an immediate retreat. The Mongols never attempted a second assault on Novgorol.

For the next few centuries, the Brosno Dragon napped and lazed and crapped out bridles and swords, rousing only for the occasional snack. For example: At one point, some Swiss mercenaries tried to bury some ill-gotten treasure on one of the lake’s small islands, until the dragon called “shenanigans” and devoured said island. (One modern theory suggests that surface disturbances attributed to the monster are actually caused by an underground volcanic vent. Just to play dragon’s advocate – you’d figure a giant creature whose diet consists of whole islands and live, armored horses would also create some significant bubbles in the tub, so to speak.) Otherwise, not much was seen of, or heard from, ol’ Brosny until WWII, when yet another invading army attempted to harsh Russia’s mellow. Always the national loyalist, the Brosno Dragon happily swallowed a Nazi airplane. (I wish this legend was a bit more fleshed out. It’s more fun, for example, to imagine the dragon leaping from the water to engulf a low-flying Luftwaffe craft than to picture him apathetically cherry-picking an already-disabled plane as it spiraled, smoking, out of the sky and into his slack-jawed mouth.)

On top of all that, there’s only one story that even suggests that the monster ever caused any Russian casualties, and in that tale, the dragon eats a single fisherman. And who knows? Guy was probably a wife beater.

2002 saw Russia sending a well-earned “Thanks, Dragon!”… In the form of low-impact, underwater explosives.

When the charge detonated, the researchers leered at the monitor, watching for any reaction from the giant, mystery lump at the lake’s bottom. Suddenly, movement! The shape on the screen began to drift toward the surface. The team scrambled to the side rails. I’ll let Vadim Chernobrav, Kosmopoisk coordinator, finish the story, as he told it to Russian newspaper “Argumenty i Facty”: “We starred at the water, and it was clear; there was nothing resembling a monster, however something unusual was still felt in the lake water.”

Perhaps that feeling was the vexed frustration of the last true Russian patriot, who Vadim Chernobrav’s team was lobbing bombs at it.

Or maybe the mutant beaver can exert psychical control over human emotions.

Friday: Utah’s Bear Lake Monster – the Mormon lake monster

Spine-tingling action! Tear-jerking romance! Head-scratching pseudo-science! It’s the Weird Things Lake and River Monster Round-up – an occasional roll call of aquatic serpents that gives you, the reader, three lake monsters in three days. That’s almost two a day!

Today: Ogopogo – British Columbia’s Okanagan Lake Monster

Nessie, Champ and Normie are all well and good in that 20th century third-hand account, blurry Polaroid sort of way. Ogopogo, though – Ogopogo demanded animal sacrifices from anyone wishing to cross over its lake. The Ogopogo of today seems a gentle giant, keeping to itself, and surfacing only for oblivious tourists and hopelessly unskilled videographers. But there was a time when the camera shy beastie trolled Okanagan’s waters with a ruthless vigilance and a bridge troll’s business acumen.

Aboriginal Salish people called the monster N’ha-a-itk, which supposedly means “lake demon” (lake demons – research that before you start thinking tribal tattoo). In the 1800s when the Europeans came barreling into the area, land-claim flags all a-thrust, it was these Aboriginals who warned the settlers about N’ha-a-itk’s strict lake toll, its supposed lair on the already-unenticing Rattlesnake Island, and its hunting grounds at Squally Point, where the Salish feared to fish. The Europeans took the news in stride, assigning armed guards to nightly lakeside patrols (not a bad idea any way, seeing as how they’d just, you know, stolen a bunch of land) and ensuring that the demon got his nummy blood tribute. It was these settlers who offered the first physical documentation of the monster – an engraving of the creature printed in the “Canadian Illustrated News” on November 30, 1872. That’s more than 60 years before the first recorded Nessie encounter.

With a paper trail of hearsay and sightings spanning back that far, one might think that Ogopogo would be eligible for a better name. N’ha-a-itk is as authentic as it is unmemorable, and other erstwhile monikers, like Snake-in-the-Lake and Wicked One, seem to serve the monster-wary namers more than the fearsome, aquatic named. But still – Ogopogo?! According to Mary Moon, author of “Ogopogo: the Okanagan Mystery” (1977), this amateurish palindrome that’s, depending on who you ask, a racist send-up of aboriginal dialect or a wacky homage to the just-introduced Pogo Stick, was supposedly coined by Bill Brimblecomb, “Weird Al” Yankovic’s Canadian predecessor. In a 1924 parody of a popular British Music Hall song, “Barmy Bill” Brimblecomb sang:

I’m looking for the Ogopogo,
His mother was a mutton,
His father was a whale.
I’m going to put a little bit of salt on his tail

Two years later, 30 carloads of beachgoers watched the monster surface into the open air and then dive back down into the depths of Okanagan. In the wake of the mass sighting, “Vancouver Sun” editor Roy Brown penned an article that more or less championed the existence of the beast, and the local Board of Trade met to decide on the animal’s Official Name. Guess what they chose.

Over the decades, more than 200 sightings of Ogopogo have been reported. Proponents of the legend enjoy pointing out that most witnesses describe the creature similarly – 15-20 feet long with a horse-like head. Many accounts also liken the creature’s appearance to that of a floating log. If it looks like a log and floats like a log, it’s probably a surviving Basilosauraus. Or so concludes British cryptozoologist Roy Mackal, who, in his book “Searching for Hidden Animals,” claims that Ogopogo resembles this prehistoric snake-like whale to a T.

The Jim Henson Creature Workshop had a different take on the Snake-in-the-Lake’s appearance. When asked to design puppets and CG models of the creature for the Lake Okanagan-set (New Zealand-filmed) family adventure movie “Mee-Shee: the Water Giant,” they decided to model Ogopogo after Walter Matthau. Had he been alive to see it, I’m sure Matthau would have been honored: “Ogo – Wha? I’m a muppet now? I thought I was already those other two muppets in the balcony. Ugh. Just make sure they pay my blood tribute.”

Wednesday: Russia’s Mongol-terrorizing, Nazi-eating Brosno Dragon

As stories of the Goatman clop their way westward across the American continent, the thoughts of a nation turn to Maryland’s monster in a desperate bid to assimilate his cloven feet and rugged beard, his buff physique and uneven temperament, his steely glare and nasal bray, into the larger framework of national mythology. Texas! Missouri! Oklahama! California! The Goatman marches. In the same way that Maryland turned their intrepid mutation into a nightstalking vessel for an age’s worth of urban legend – the hookman, the Crybaby Bridge and even Bigfoot – so, too, do other states incorporate the fantastical axe-wielding émigré into their own local folklore.

While the Goatman blazed his way across the American South, stopping once in Arkansas to brandish a severed human leg at a Sonic waitress and once in Texas to chase after a rowdy band of teenagers, rumors of his possible connection to El Chupacabra began to surface. Could the insidious goat sucker that’s been exsanguinating American beef stock be the unholy progeny of the Goatman’s cross-country sex safari? Probably not – though it has been suggested. A more popular theory is that, given his penchant for ruthlessly dispensing with neighborhood pets, the Goatman might be El Chupacabra’s cousin. Sounds similar to Maryland’s “Bigfoot is a relative of the Goatman” theory, no?

While the Goatman diverted northward through Oklahoma and, eventually, Washington State, Bigfoot aficionados began to balk at the monster’s popularity. Many modern Sasquatch enthusiasts branded the creature a children’s story, undeserving of either national press or rigorous scientific attention. In a 1998 article in the “Washington City Paper,” (“The Legend of Goatman”) Tennessee Bigfoot hunter Scott McNabb dismissively declared, “Goatman is not an interest of mine.” McNabb went on to explain that, unlike Bigfoot, the Goatman tale lacks historical and scientific plausibility. Other Bigfoot hunters, while equally skeptical, have been more diplomatic in their assessment of Maryland’s fair-weather paranormal mascot – perhaps, they posit, the so called “Goatman” is a sasquatch that has fallen ill and lost patches of hair, causing it to appear more like a human/animal hybrid than a full-on missing link. One thing’s certain – for someone who’s feeling a bit under the weather, homeboy sure gets around.

The question is, what is it about the Goatman story – once the paragon of a locally confined myth – that has allowed its progress from anytown, MD to everytown, USA? Other equally compelling taxonomical conundrums (the Dover Demon, the Loveland Frog, the Beast of Bray Road, etc.) have gained national attention without ever managing to parlay local infamy into a physical nationwide presence.

Maybe it’s the fact that, as a humanoid creature with a consistently dark, but methodologically varied, modus operandi, the Goatman fits in nicely with America’s array of local Bigfoot analogs (Skunk Ape, Wild Man, Sasquatch, Tsiatko, etc.), many of whom display varying behaviors, but all of whom exhibit similar physical attributes. Bipedal posture. Hirsute bodies. Man-like faces. Heck, even Marylanders have posited the Goatman as Bigfoot’s genetic constituent. And the thing both Bigfoot and the Goatman have over, say, the Loveland Frog (a giant frog) is that they kinda look like big, hairy dudes in the woods. In the eyes of an observer, an axe-schlepping lumberjack is just four beers and forty feet away from the Goatman (or from evidence that Bigfoot’s a shill for the logging industry).

Maybe it’s a combination of natural Internet proliferation combined with his striking resemblance to the devil. Given that urban legends tend to spread most readily among an American teenage demographic that has, for decades, afforded all things Satanic a bleary eyed thumbs up (see every pentagram etched apathetically on to middle-school notebooks ever), a story about an evil marauding demon who hunts down doers of “it” comes pretty much campfire ready.

Maybe it’s just because he’s a man-sized goat with an axe.

Regardless, you might think about setting an extra place at the kitchen table. And picking up a third ticket to prom. The Goatman is coming to your town. And attending your prom after he eats dinner at your house. Maryland totally owes you one.

Save for one generalized tale of Satanism (The Goatman is a ritualistically summoned demon), the origin stories ascribed to the Goatman are the best kind of local folklore – geographically obsessed, historically revisionist and unflinchingly paranoid. That isn’t to say that they’re particularly original. You’ll recognize the antiseptic white of the research facility’s corridors, and the hollow screams resounding from mental ward cells. Still, of all the secret government labs in all the towns in all the world, the Goatman walked out of Beltsville, Maryland’s.

Given Maryland’s proximity to Washington, D.C., it’s no surprise that the government has been implicated in the genesis of the Goatman. Specifically, it’s the government’s Agricultural Research Facility, located in Beltsville, that often takes the blame (though I would think it unlikely that they also gave their horrific mutation an axe. Perhaps a rogue Smithsonian curator got involved). If the government has property in or near a town, you can count on it becoming the nexus of at least one sensational and horrifying urban myth (e.g., the U.S.S. Eldridge, the Montauk Project, et al).

There are two schools of thought as to the true nature of the Goatman – some folks believe that he’s an anomalously hairy, super-sized human whose feral lifestyle has earned him the appearance, and corresponding badittude, of a goat; Others think that he is an actual, genuine monster composed of one-half horrifying goatness and one-half unfettered masculinity. For the people whose theories tend toward the former, the Goatman was once a burly, 7-foot-tall government scientist who lost his funding and, subsequently, his mind, then ran screaming out into the woods and began a new life of regimented beard growth and teen sex intervention. (Because a monster? That’s ridiculous!) For the latter camp, the Goatman is the accidental result of a government experiment gone horribly awry. What kind of experiment? It usually isn’t specified, though one version suggests that an early cancer researcher injected a goat with live cancer cells, which, when combined with radiation or something, kick-started the animal’s transformation (metastasis?).

In his book “The Men Who Stare at Goats,” journalist Jon Ronson does, in fact, claim that the government has been known to use de-bleated goats for various training and tests, but given the Goatman’s alleged noisy vocalizations, it seems unlikely that he started as a member of Uncle Sam’s black ops seen-not-heard herd. Fortunately, there’s another, more recent theory: the Goatman is an escaped inmate of Glenn Dale Hospital. Again, in this case, two variations exist – the one where he’s a hulking nutcase and the one where he’s a freakish medical experiment. Both versions agree that he came straight from the stark-raving hell of restrained lunatics and abused maniacs that constituted the now-derelict Glenn Dale Hospital. There’s only one problem with this hypothesis – Glenn Dale Hospital was never, as many websites suggest, a mental hospital. It was a tuberculosis sanitarium used to isolate contagious victims of the then-common disease from the public at large, and from other hospital communities. After the building was declared a free-range asbestos ranch and shut down in 1982, however, paranormal investigators and urban photographers laid siege to the grounds, extensively (and inaccurately) blogging about their explorations of the abandoned Glenn Dale asylum. Interestingly, no story that I’ve found suggests that the Goat Man is an escaped tuberculosis patient, driven insane by his disease and often mistaken for a goat due to his rasping, nasal cough. But I guess a brawny psychopath is more frightening/goat-like than a wheezing tubercular corpse, despite historical veracity.

Nowadays, in deference to his fantastical origins and initial rambunctiousness, the Maryland Goatman seems to have abandoned flamboyant assaults on copulating youth in favor of covert pet theft and vandalism. It seems more than likely that the Goatman has fled its stomping grounds, leaving the people of the Old Line State to repurpose his horrific legacy into a banal catch-all blame depository. Can’t find the dog? The Goatman took it. Something dented your car door? ‘Twas the Goatman’s axe. Thankfully, as Maryland trembles in the wake of their misdemeanorous Scapegoatman, the true monster has taken his act on the road.

Friday: The America Goatman

The legend of the Maryland Goatman is as much a narrative chimera as its deformed antagonist is a physical one. Descriptions of the hulking manimal, whose bushy beard and hairy human torso sit atop sinewy goat legs and fibrous hooves, immediately recall the mischievous satyrs of Greek mythology. Pop a couple horns on his fat, angry head (as some cryptozoologically inclined artistes have), and the Goatman even looks a bit like certain artist renderings of Satan, only with a cartoonishly threatening double-bladed axe in lieu of the classic sinner-pokin’ pitchfork.

I know. It’s hard to think of a modern story that doesn’t owe something to the Greeks or the Pagans or medieval personifications of evil. (Maybe “Sideways,” but even there – who can honestly look at Paul Giamatti without picturing him wearing a diaper and shooting heart-tipped arrows at a cartoon dog just as it’s looking at a cartoon cat?) But even as a modern American urban legend, the Goatman is a different animal.

Take, for instance, the monster’s aforementioned ‘50s debut – a bombastic affair in which the axe-toting Goatman went violently a-knockin’ on the hood of a car that was a-rockin’. After gleefully cutting in on the teenage couple’s horizontal mambo, the crazed monster fled into the woods, leaving the terrified adolescents practically peeing their pants, but actually just peeing the car seat near the pants that they had so lustfully removed. This story, and its ensuing echoed repetition among the randy pubescent suburbanites of Prince George’s County, bears all the tongue-clucking sex-negative hallmarks s of the ubiquitous hook-handed killer urban legend. Granted, some irritating scraping and a hook on the door handle is a bit subtler than enraged, melee-ready, bipedal livestock, but, you know, whatever it takes to chop a message through those thick teenage skulls, right?

Now, I don’t know about where you live, but here in Ohio, we’ve got at least two dozen alleged crybaby bridges – water-spanning roadways from which nighttime drivers claim to hear the sobbing of apparitional infants and women. These bridges are reported in every state (to the extent that well-known folklorist and artist Jesse Glass even declared the phenomenon Internet-perpetrated “fakelore”), and every bridge has its own story about a drowned baby or a suicidal lady, blah blah blah, hear the pathetic whiners’ posthumous boo-hooing. In Prince George’s County, though, that isn’t a fussy ghost you hear bawling its stupid eyes out under the bridge – it’s the Goatman. And he’s braying. Because he’s enraged. Or in heat. Either way, it’s another prevalent urban legend that Maryland has appended to the ink, type and whisper patchwork that is the Goatman tale.

A few imaginative Marylanders have even gone as far as to dub the Goatman “Bigfoot’s cousin.” Man ape. Man goat. It’s all the same to them.

The Goatman story may be composed of a buncha locally repackaged urban myths, but he isn’t only that. He has an origin story. More accurately, in typical “now make it giant and crazy and give it an axe” Maryland fashion, he has about five. And all of them are winners. Check back on Wednesday to find out how this bridge-sobbing hump disrupter came into being, and what the U.S. Government had to do with it.

If you want another example of the difference between Native American Skinwalker lore and white America’s (find me a black person fondling crystals in Sedona and I’ll issue a correction) embarrassing Mulderfication thereof, one need look no further than Utah’s 480-acre Sherman Ranch, AKA Skinwalker Ranch. The muddled mythology of this supposed paranormal hotbed reads like a veritable roll call of late 20th century fringe culture supernatural obsessions. UFOs. Interdimensional vortices. Sasquatches. Psychic disturbances. Cattle mutilation. Glowing orbs. Ghostly apparitions. They’re all present and scientifically unaccounted for in one dusty, northern corner of the Beehive State.

It was investigative journalist George Knapp, best known for his frequent presence on talk radio’s paranormal mecca Coast to Coast AM, who first called “Jinkies!” on Sherman Ranch. Likewise, it was Knapp who invoked the Skinwalker legend in explaining some of the area’s countless tales of things that make any variety of ridiculous onomatopoeias in the night (for example, I have no idea what a “large humanoid creature” crawling out of a “glowing portal” sounds like). Knapp’s resulting two-part 2002 newspaper feature “Path of the Skinwalker,” which appeared in Sin City’s alt weekly “the Las Vegas Mercury,” is thousands of words worth of largely anonymous testimony (such as that of “a scientist” who has “a long list of peer-reviewed papers about cutting-edge scientific concepts”), grossly subjective reporting and references to the movie “Predator.”

What does any of this have to do with Skinwalkers? Well, according to Junior Hicks, helpfully identified in Knapp’s article as “the area’s unofficial historian for all things weird,” the local Ute Indian tribe believes that the ranch is cursed by evil Skinwalking Navajo spirits, who have turned the area into a dimensional base camp for their malevolent magical shenanigans. Hicks, the only source cited for Knapp’s Skinwalker info, goes on: “The Utes say the ranch is `the path of the Skinwalker.’ Tribe members are strictly forbidden from setting foot on the property.”

Okay… but ghosts, aliens and the Predator? What does any of that have to do with Skinwalkers? For the sake of progressing, let me rephrase: why, given all of the various phenomena reported at the ranch, did Knapp choose the Skinwalker story as the lynchpin of the article? The Ute story is mentioned all of two times, and even Knapp concludes that it fails to explain most of the mysterious happenings.

Wednesday’s post covered my thoughts on some of the larger socio-cultural ramifications of the larger proliferation of the Skinwalker legend. Self-hating white liberals reductively correlate Native American tradition with nature, spiritualism and, most condescendingly, innocent simplicity, brand it as “true” American heritage, sell it to other self-hating white liberals and think of it as reparations. The resulting mysticism Americans associate with Native Americans is once removed from their own cultural experience in a way that Bigfoot or crop circles aren’t. In the end, the same people who wouldn’t even skim a story called “Path of the UFO” will devour a narrative piece that has the slightest glaze of exaggerated indigent tribalism.

But none of that is Knapp’s fault. Homeboy’s just making a living. Obviously, Knapp, who would probably make a better salesman than he does a journalist, understands that the Indian curse angle is more compelling to most people than the psychic vortex angle, accuracy be damned. (On a side note, I always thought it was funny how paranormal researchers always try to back up their claims using the legends of primitive cultures. “We’ve got historical evidence! See, these scientifically ignorant superstitious guys who worshipped trees drew pictures of UFOs! If we made up UFOs, how did these people who thought lightening was a demon know about them?”)

Anyway, I want to end this week on a positive note. So, why did Knapp choose the Skinwalker story as the lynchpin of the article?

Because Skinwalker is an awesome word. Seriously. Even deprived of all cultural associations. It’s an unfamiliar pairing of two familiar concepts that induces an evocative mental image. Skinwalker. Totally wicked!

Though, I can’t help but think that conclusions like these are why the Navajo don’t like to talk about Skinwalkers.

The Navajo don’t really like to talk about Skinwalkers – especially with monster-obsessed whiteys who invariably convert rich oral tradition into airport-ready supernatural thrillers (Tony Hillerman’s “Skinwalkers”) and straight-to-DVD horror flicks (James Isaac’s “Skinwalkers”). That means that, assuming the four or five template-based paranormal blogs that feature excitable Skinwalker posts aren’t written by defecting Navajo tribesmen (a fairly safe bet), it’s difficult to separate the authentic Skinwalker lore from the hyperactive Native American fan fic of cable doc-obsessed Fox Mulder wannabes. For every believable, richly folkloric Navajo Skinwalker legend, there are two or three stories about this one time really late at night when a crazy manimal totally attacked someone (I swear, it happened to my cousin’s friend).

According to some (supposed) Navajo legends, during the Long Walk, when the U.S. government forced over 9,000 Navajos to take a 300-mile trudge to newly established reservation land near Fort Sumner, New Mexico, the Skinwalkers were the first to reach the destination. As Navajo women keeled over in the heat, and exhausted men struggled with unconscious children, Skinwalking witches simply transformed into coyotes and crows, which easily sprinted or flew all the way to the reservation. Despite the Skinwalkers’ traditionally evil nature, they are distinctly Navajo and, therefore, proved vital to the preservation of Navajo heritage in the wake of the cultural upheaval brought on by external forces.

Granted, there are plenty of Navajo tales that portray Skinwalkers in a more traditionally antagonistic light. Still, you’d be hard-pressed to find a non-Native Skinwalker story that offered anything but a watered-down cocktail of mystery and terror. They essentially play out like this:

One night a New Mexico state trooper was patrolling the desert around a Navajo reservation. Suddenly, he noticed a strange shape rushing up

alongside his car. The shape resolved into a hideous creature that ran as fast as the officer’s sedan could accelerate. The monster kept pace with the trooper for miles before finally dropping back and disappearing into the darkness. To this day, the officer refuses to patrol that accursed stretch of land.

The same non-native America that repackaged Native American art as kitschy fetish crafts and airbrushed paintings of wolves has turned Skinwalkers, who have a uniquely dynamic relationship with their origin culture, into generic monsters that lurk in the shadows and jump out at passing victims.

And I don’t think that’s a negative a thing.

For decades Native Americans have fought to retain their unique heritage and identities in the face of an ever homogenizing American culture. For most countries – countries with separate and independent geographies – it’s a low stakes game. Germanic tradition, for example, can be assimilated into America’s aggregate culture without losing its physical roots in Germany, or its emotional and intellectual roots in the Germans that still reside there. Native Americans only have America, and most of that was taken from them. The borders they do have – both geographical and cultural – are shrinking. The Navajo don’t really like to talk about Skinwalkers, and so the cable doc-obsessed Fox Mulder wannabes think of the beings as mystical native werewolves – feral and savage, or magic and prescient, or sexy and strong. Cold. Uni-dimensional. Non-dynamic. Inhuman.

The Navajo don’t really like to talk about Skinwalkers, and so the Fox Mulder wannabes are ignorant and xenophobic and maybe even mildly racist. But these things – ignorance, xenophobia, racism – build boundaries between people and cultures. These things strengthen borders.

During the Long Walk, the white men let the Skinwalkers charge on, unmolested, toward Fort Sumner because they saw them as animals. Because they didn’t recognize them for what they truly were – scouts and emissaries; patriarchs and magicians; Navajo. Perhaps today the Native Americans depend on white men to sell cheap headdresses and inauthentic drums and synthetic dream catchers, to make terrible straight-to-DVD horror movies, so all eyes are looking down at cash registers or through camera lenses while, unnoticed, a flock of crows passes by overhead.

The best thing about secret government research projects is the fun, random codenames. For example – Project Bluebird… Weaponized birds activated by pitching peanut butter-and-seed-coated pinecones into an enemy camp? Not even a little bit. This 1950s CIA program was created to research alternative (generally psychopharmacological) prisoner interrogation techniques, and to create a new breed of puppet spook, whose free will, up to and including his self preservation instinct, was completely suppressed. Most of the experiment was spent administering low dosages of synthetic drugs and chemicals, including heroin, PCP, mescaline, LSD and ether, to unknowing military personnel stationed at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. While the CIA was tangentially interested in the direct effects of the psychotropics and narcotics, their real mission was to study the exploitability of withdrawal-addled soldiers – a goal they accomplished by suddenly ceasing test patients’ regular mickey slips. Of the 7,000 unwitting Project Bluebird participants, 1,000 demonstrated symptoms of epilepsy and clinical mopiness, including suicide attempts and the writing of songs with the word “Blues” in the titles.

(Project Bluebird was later renamed Project Artichoke, a surprisingly apt name that recalls bitter thistles cooked in acrid vinegar water and served up on admittedly delicious pizza, but Satan is the delivery guy and he thinks it’s funny to “forget” to seal the insulated transport bag.)

In 1953, after CIA director Allen Dulles allegedly started bitching and moaning about how many more brain-diddling experiments the government could conduct if they had additional human test subjects, the CIA consolidated all of its varied interrogation research under a singular covert umbrella – the now-infamous MKULTRA. While most folks associate these experiments with LSD research, the MKULTRA project had so many facets and subprograms that its claims of heightened efficiency are dubious. Project QKHILLTOP studied Chinese brainwashing techniques. Subproject 68, operated out of Canada, attempted to chemically erase subjects’ minds (via drug-induced comas) so that scientists could then rewrite the subjects’ personalities based on government specifications. The best, though, both methodologically and fun-codename-wise, was Operation Midnight Climax (yes, that is just what you were looking for, name-seeking high school-aged rock band), in which CIA-compensated hookers lured clients to government safehouses, where the johns underwent LSD dosings and sexual blackmail all in the name of interrogation research.

MKULTRA was shut down in the early 70s, though many believe that contemporary psychological interrogation techniques, such as those employed in Guantanamo Bay, are direct descendents of the CIA’s zany research.

While MKULTRA was chugging along, the U.S. Army, plied as it was on CIA-administered hallucinogens, conducted a wide array of chemical experiments, which didn’t have fun codenames, so whatever. I’ll just rattle them off real quick like. They tested chemical weapon dispersion patterns by blitzing six cities with toxic chemical sprays (I would have called it Project Bandersnatch). They (in cooperation with Dow Chemical, Johnson & Johnson and Dr. Albert Kligman) injected 70 Holmesburg State Prison inmates with herbicides (I would’ve called this one Project Potpourri Elitism). Additionally, they subjected other Holmesburg prisoners to toxic skin-blistering acids, so that scientists could observe the healing process (me thinks Project Sapphire Dingle).

The important things to get out of all this are a) you’re probably drinking government chemicals right now, but don’t worry… any damage that was going to happen already happened way back in your mom’s uterus when you were sucking whooping cough and DDT through your umbilical cord. It’s probably why coffee smell makes your eyes bleed; b) lots of the experiments detailed in this week’s posts had irrefutably positive results and saved dying babies and whatever so chill out. Christ; c) fun codenames. I’m serious about this. Even it just means re-titling the index cards in your recipe binder or sitting down with your significant other and assigning black ops aliases to your favorite sex positions, you need to apply this to your life.