Lionel Fanthorpe

I've run across Rev. Lionel Fanthorpe in the past, mainly as the presenter of Fortean TV, a series I haven't managed to get through thanks to the aggressive obnoxiousness of British 90's-ness.


I've run across him again recently, this time as the author of well over a hundred pulp sci-fi paperbacks in the 50s and 60s.  Operating under multiple pen names, he wrote most of the sci-fi and supernatural titles for Badger Books, an outfit had authors churn out fiction to match the covers they had procured.  Check out their awesomeness here.

He's still active, known mostly now for Fortean books and showing up on British TV.  I was thrilled to find a ton of his Badger Books stuff reasonably priced on Amazon, but I had some mixed feelings about the presentation.

The majority of the titles have a generic cover, though a few have the Badger classics.  The books are out by Hachette Book Group, one of the Big Five publishers.  One would think they would package the books more professionally, but I can understand the choice not to.  Based on some of my knowledge of Amazon ranking, I can tell that some of these titles have not sold a single copy in two years.

I would love to see these with the original covers, but it probably doesn't make sense financially.  Even if they still owned the covers, the rights management of it would cost more than they would recoup.  As it is, even if they already had nicely formatted .doc files of the text and just had an intern dump them all into KDP, they're losing money.  I'd rather have these gems available cheaply (or at all), than have to hunt them on ebay because it doesn't pay to reissue them.

The Oily Man

The Orang Minyak, or oily man, is a good example of when ancient folklore meets modern media and becomes urban myth.

The oily man began in Malaysian folklore, but I'm not familiar with those original tales.  The tale was popularized in the 1956 film Sumpah Orang Minyak.  At this point, the legend is that a man makes a deal with the devil to win back a lost love.  In exchange, the man had to rape 21 virgins within a week.  Other versions had the man make a deal with an evil shaman.  The man covered himself in oil so that he could slip through anyone's grasp to evade capture.

Through the sixties until today, there have been reports of an orang minyak terrorizing various villages and colleges.  Since he only attacks virgins, women would borrow sweaty clothes from men to give the impression that they weren't.  Of course, in reality, they are in fact advertising that they are virgins to the rest of the world, which may be the point.

I can't find my original reference, but within the last few years there was a scare at a Malaysian college and administration had to follow up with complaints that there were several rapes by a orang minyak that were unsolved.  The police responded by saying that had no official reports, and it dissolved into the classic urban myth "friend of a friend" scenario when they tried to track down any actual victims.

By this point we have a more rationalistic approach to the orang minyak.  Instead of being a man that gains magical powers, he is now a man who thinks he will gain magical powers.  To complicate the mix, there may be actual copycat rapists who actually do attack women.  Or a panic about copycats when none actually exist.

There is a similar notion in Sri Lanka of the Salini, or grease devil, which appears to follow similar lines, only this time there have been arrests and suspects killed by vigilante mobs.  Here we get more muddling elements, such as murders that are committed by criminals or corrupt government elements using the accusations as a cover.

Sound like material ripe for exploitation?  You bet -

Creepier, we have a ton of YouTube hits of villagers beating up suspected orang minyaks, or CCTV footage of men walking around in their underwear, and/or hoaxes of either.

On a lighter note, there's evidently a dance:

Real Evil - "Ghost" Rapists of Bolivia

In Bolivia, in Manitoba Colony, there is a group of Mennonites (similar to Amish), who reported several attacks on women between 2005 and 2009.  The women were attacked in their sleep, with only hazy dreams instead of memories.  Originally the rapes were blamed on imagination, ghosts, and demons, despite physical evidence left behind.

Eventually, a gang of Mennonite men were arrested and convicted of the attacks.  They used an anesthetizing spray obtained from a veterinarian and sprayed their victim's houses to knock out entire families before attacking - shades of the Mad Gasser of Mattoon.

More from Vice

Things I Didn't Finish - The Missing 411

I'm lying - I'm not even going to start this one.

I was interested in the Missing 411 book series by David Paulides because it's a brand new paranormal and/or conspiracy theory, but on further examination I'm not sure it's much of anything.  I'm making some assumptions seeing as the promotion has been on Coast to Coast and similar venues, so I don't think this is just a critique of search and rescue techniques.

Here's what I know from interviews and promotional materials without shelling out $25.  I'll stop when I get to something inexplicable.

People go missing in our national parks.

People that get lost in the woods sometimes act funny while they die of exposure.

Research is hard.

Nope, nothing going on here.  Let's break this down a little more.  Yes, people get lost in National Parks.  It's very easy to get lost and not very easy to get found.

The smoke where there is a conspiratorial fire is that Paulides claims that the government does not keep records of missing people in the national parks.  Really? What I think he really means with pat statements like that is there is not a current list of all persons still considered missing, like the big "Solved/Unsolved/Cold" blackboards in a Homicide Division of a TV cop show.  Of course records are kept, but if you want all the records for every missing persons case in the national parks over like 200 years, yes, it will get expensive.

This bit gets represented differently in almost every account I've seen.  In some places he says they don't keep any records whatsoever, which is clearly not true.  In one account he said they refused an FOIA request saying no records exist, in another he said the request would have been ungodly expensive because of the massive amounts of records.

Criticizing a government agency for sucking at their job and having research unfriendly record keeping techniques is a fair and American thing to do.  However, it makes for a lousy foundation of a conspiracy theory.  From the interviews I heard I didn't get the sense that the Parks Department was stonewalling anyone - it seemed more the case that they weren't going to research and compile his book for him on the cheap.

I wouldn't harp on this so much except that it not only seems to be the cornerstone of an implied conspiracy, but it's mentioned in every ordering page and piece of promotion that the project took over three years and 7000 hours of investigation.  Brag about those numbers to a published academic and see how impressed they are.

On to the mysterious disappearances.  He must have been saving the "mysterious" part for the paying audience, because he doesn't give good examples in the promotions.  People are found further away than expected, or they're found uphill from where they were.  Sometimes dogs don't find the scent.  Sometimes people are found dead close to roads or where searchers already looked.  None of the examples he gives seem that particularly unusual, much less unexplainable.  It's very easy to get lost, people panic and do weird things, and finding a dead body in the woods is near impossible.

The strangest phenomena is also the one easiest explained.  People who die of exposure are often found fully or partially naked.  I don't know if the book implies this, but many of the readers have been drawing the conclusion that there is some kind of weird sexual abduction thing going on.

People get weird when they are afraid, and being lost in the woods is one of the most terrifying things I can think of.  Add to the mix exhaustion and hypothermia, and the victim can get become disoriented, get amnesia, or become combative.  In the final stages of hypothermia, they also remove clothing and try burrowing into a hole or crevice.  These are called paradoxical undressing and terminal burrowing.  Things so common and well known they have fancy scientific names and everything.

We aren't exactly sure what causes paradoxical undressing, as it seems to occur in the final, terminal stages of hypothermia, but it's believed that the brain or nerve endings get damaged or confused, causing the victim to feel heat.  This happens in 20-50% of hypothermia deaths, so it's not exactly rare.

Not letting science spoil another good mystery, Paulides refutes the existence of paradoxical undressing, because he talked to a mountain climber that never heard of it.  Well, that settles that.

There's also the matter of clusters, that disappearance tend to happen in proximity in location and time.  The biggest such cluster of parks disappearances is in Yellowstone, as oppose to say, downtown Chicago.  Research is hard, but statistical modeling is, like, really hard.  Maybe he has models that compare rates of total park visitors to the missing, has accounted for variations in the data collecting methods, and has calculated a margin of error for but I'm guessing not so much.

My understanding is that there is not a hypothesis of the cause of the phenomena in the book itself.  One thing that is evidently not the cause, if Paulides' ubiquitous online defensive comments mean anything, is Bigfoot.  Some reviewers even lazier than me jumped to some unfair conclusions, but where did they get that idea?  Well, let's go over to the order page at the North American Bigfoot Search website.  The order links are at the bottom, leading to the page titled Bigfoot Store.  Hey, who's that hairy guy at the top?

Maybe there's some fortean high weirdness in the book, but this just sounds like when you lose your keys and then find them later in the freezer.  You can't explain how they got there, but it's not exactly the Unexplained.

Things I Didn't Finish - The Amityville Mid-Life Crisis

My Amityville Horror, 2012


Daniel Lutz was one of the real life kids living in the real house of the fake Amityville Horror.  He's all grown up and he has some issues.

The Amityville Horror involves layers of embellishment added by writers and Hollywood, so I was interested in the take of one of the surviving principles, especially one that didn't have a financial interest in it.  I got just far enough to not trust a word this guy says.

Clip 1 - Daniel is at his therapist, who he promptly interrupts to let everyone know he has control issues and needs to be the center of attention.

Clip 2 - You're going to put in me playing guitar, right?  I bet a lot of industry people are going to see this!

TAP TAP TAP

From some quick reviews it looks like I made the right decision.  Lots more arguing with the therapist, lots more guitar, and more ridiculous claims, like something about his dad having telekinetic powers or something.  This might have some interest as one of those mean spirited documentaries that follow around some human train wreck, like Grizzly Man or Grey Gardens, but I don't think this was the angle they were going for.

Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life

Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life
Ivan T Sanderson, 1961

There are over 500 pages to Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life, and almost none of it on the abominable snowman, in the sense of the yeti and similar.  Here, Sanderson uses the term to describe all hairy hominids, though he predicts that the term Oh-Mah is on the rise, unlike that ridiculous "bigfoot".

Actual sightings take up a small fraction of the wordage, the rest taken up with geography, botany, theology, and these gems:

"It appears that in certain circumstances human beings may give rise to just such faeces as depicted here. I have information on two such eventualities. The first is of Alaskan Eskimos who go on an almost exclusive diet of whale blubber in lean winters. This causes not just chronic constipation but a major blockage of the lower bowel which may result in retention for many weeks or months.

Then, the family group goes in search of certain willows, the astringent bark of which they strip and eat. This acts as a very violent purgative. As a result of this, they finally manage to eliminate but not without great pain, splitting of the anus, and a great loss of blood. The sorry process was most graphically described to me in a letter from a U.S. Government agent in Alaska.

The other example of this medical obscurity that I have on record is that of what are called in China 'Shensi-Babies.' These are single, enormous, extremely solid faeces, eliminated by confirmed opium eaters, and sometimes by opium smokers, who have gone into prolonged periods of withdrawal due to narcotization; during which evacuation is ignored or actually physically impossible. Resultant faeces, when elimination does occur, are said to be, on occasion, as much as 2 feet long and 4 inches in diameter."

also:

"the yellow-skinned, glabrous Bushmen, with their steatopygy [or fat bottoms], the strange form of the male penis which is often permanently semi-erect, and the odd development of the female labia minora into huge flaps that may fall even to the knees, and which are known as 'Hottentot Aprons' "

Read it free here.

Clownwatch

Clown sightings in Northampton

While these are likely a combination of pseudo-performance art and internet flash meme whatevers, they are reminiscent of a more sinister rash of clown attacks that plagued Chicago in the early 90s by Homey the Clown...



... in one of the least original urban myths.