On the Radio Again!

I did a two-hour spot on the Midnight in the Desert radio show. This time I was talking about legends of the Wild West and spy shortwave radio stations. I love doing these radio spots. The host, David Schrader, is a real pro and makes it easy, and since all the listeners are invisible, I don't get stage fright!

Click here to listen to the show.

Book Review: Monsters, Giants and Little Men from Mars

Monsters, Giants and Little Men from Mars: An Unnatural History of the Americas by Daniel Cohen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A fun little book on cryptozoology, the study of animals that aren't supposed to exist. You get all the usual ones here like the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot, as well as stranger ones like the Bunnyman of Washington DC and my personal favorite, the globster. Cohen also goes beyond traditional cryptozoology to cover obviously folkloric creatures that no one ever thought existed, known fakes such as the Cardiff Giant, and UFOs. You also get the original Men in Black, not the movie.
It's all done in a breezy, fun style that doesn't take itself too seriously. The book is a bit short, so "serious" students of cryptozoology will want to consult works by more encyclopedic researchers such as Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark. This would be good for a young adult reader, though, and is wonderful grist for a writer's mill.

View all my reviews

Old West Photo Friday: Cowboys shoot down a Thunderbird

My regular readers know that weird legends from the Old West are one of my favorite topics, and that includes the fabulous Thunderbird. This giant critter supposedly flew the skies of the frontier, scaring Native Americans and cowboys alike until one was supposedly shot down near Tombstone, Arizona. There was an article in the 26 April 1890 edition of the Tombstone Epitaph about two cowboys shooting a creature with leathery wings like a bat and a head like an alligator. They dragged it back to town and nailed it up to a barn, its wingspan covering the barn's entire length.

I've written about the Thunderbird before, and how photos of the beast have become an obsession with cryptozoologists. Several photos claiming to be of the Tombstone creature circulate around the Internet, along with several more showing Civil War soldiers bagging flying monsters, as well as this more modern shot that looks like it's from the mid-twentieth century. Sadly, while there are so many Thunderbird photos, no one seems to have an actual Thunderbird stuck up on their wall.

For more on this crazy story, see my posts on pterodactyl sightings in America and another photo of cowboys with a pterodactyl. I also wrote about it in my new booklet, The Weird Wild West: Tall Tales and Legends about the Frontier.


While I'm careful to use only public domain photos in this blog, I'm not sure this one is. If it's really as old as it appears, then it's public domain. It could simply be an old fake. If it's modern, then I'm in breach of copyright, but the only way the creator could sue me is if they admitted faking the photo! I'll take that chance. :-)

Old West Photo Friday: Cowboy Riding Jackalope

Here's an old postcard showing a cowboy riding the fabled Jackalope. While most Jackalopes are rabbit sized, sometimes they get big enough for cowboys to saddle them up and hop around the plains. A Jackalope, of course, is a cross between a jackrabbit and an antelope.

You can read about Jackalopes and a lot of other weird stuff in my new booklet out by Charles River Editors, The Weird Wild West: Tall Tales and Legends about the Frontier. There was a free giveaway on Amazon for the past couple of days, but since I was traveling up to Oxford I didn't get a chance to tell all of you. Sorry about that! I think a lot of people will be reaidng about Jackalopes this week because it made it to #271 on Amazon!

Charles River has come out with a second booklet of mine on The Trench Warfare of World War I. It got up to #338 on Amazon during the free giveaway. Sadly, that's also over. I should really get a Smartphone and start obsessively checking the Internet like everyone else. On second thought, I think I'll stay in the real world. That's where the Jackalopes live!


Photo courtesy Jackalope postcards, which has an amazing collection online. Seeing is believing!

Globsters, baldknobbers, and Wild West pterodactyls: I'm interviewed on the A to Z blog!

Hey folks. I'm over at the A to Z blog today talking about the A to Z blogging challenge. You'll hear all about cryptids, Ozark vigilantes, and where Clint Eastwood got his trademark grimace. Head on over and check it out!

Photo of the Chilean Blob, one of the more loveable globsters, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Photo Friday: The Globster

It's the end of a long week and I'm feeling frivolous, so this Photo Friday is dedicated to one of my favorite mystery beasts--the globster!

What's a globster, you ask? It's an unidentified blob of flesh washed up on the beach. It's smelly, decaying, and generally nasty. People used to think they were some type of sea monster or unidentified species of giant squid or octopus. I've always had a soft spot in my heart for globsters. Perhaps it's the name, or their irresistible cuteness. Perhaps it's because I always root for the underdog, and you can't get much lower than being a rotting hunk of unidentifiable meat on the beach being gawked at by local yokels.

The above photo is of the St. Augustine Monster, which washed ashore near St. Augustine, Florida, in 1896. Needless to say it caused quite a stir. A scientist who say it thought it was an octopus because of the arm-like appendages you can see here. Journalists, of course, immediately labeled it a sea monster.

Maybe the journalists were right for once. Maybe in the unexplored depths of the ocean there are colonies of globsters, perhaps with a highly evolved civilization to hide themselves from our advancing technology. They're only spotted when one dies and floats to the surface!

Alas, I've never seen a globster. My closest brush with the unknown was "seeing" the infamous Thunderbird photo. I have to be content reading about them at Globhome.

This photo is of the Chilean Blob. It washed up on the shore of Chile back in 2003. At first it couldn't be identified, but then some party poopers at a biological laboratory checked the DNA and found it came from a sperm whale. Part of the blubber layer separated from the rest of the decaying animal and eventually made it to the beach and into the newspapers. The researchers theorize that most or all globster may also be whale blubber.

But hey, DNA samples can be wrong, just ask anyone on death row! There's still a chance that the Lost Civilization of the Globsters will rise from the deep to reclaim their dead. . .

[Photos of the St. Augustine Monster and Chilean Blob courtesy Wikimedia Commons]