mountain_laurel | one of those comments that got out of hand (Reply)

tongodeon's post about the disappointing lack of modern UFO footage sent me off on a long digression about UFOlogy and Forteana in general, which ended up being too long to post as a comment.

marq and i ran audio for a convention of the DC area Fortean Society chapter one year, and i got to meet Edward Walters. he had a pretty interesting presentation, and he spent quite a bit of time on UFO film authentication issues, and the relative difficultly of faking film vs. video. this was in '88 or '89, i think, so well before the days of digital video. his claim was that videotape was the hardest format to fake, and he had some really interesting comparison shots of the common ways to fake UFO footage, where he demonstrated how a lot of the famous films were faked and how much more difficult the same methods were with video.

he came off as surprisingly sane and credible, considering that most UFO buffs are complete nutbars. (my dad included -- he had a lifelong fascination with UFOs, and in the early days of his retirement, he amused himself by tracking down people who reported UFO sightings and interviewing them. one of my favorite memories of my dad was the time i asked him why aliens would be flying around giving anal probes to random rednecks, and he replied, with hilarious intensity, "that's exactly it: why?" this from a man who worked for NASA for 40 years.)

i suppose i should mention that i actually have my very own UFO sighting: when i was, i don't know, 14 or so, i was walking down the street and noticed a bright, ovoid light in the sky up to my left, which seemed to be following me along the street. when i looked up, it hovered for a few seconds and then suddenly accelerated to an impossible speed along the street, then took off upward at about a 45 degree angle and vanished. it definitely wasn't a plane or any other man-made aircraft i can imagine, but i don't actually believe it was an alien spacecraft either. i don't know what it was. probably a trick of the light, unconsciously embellished by my imagination. either way, it was unidentified and it flew, thus it was a UFO.

anyway, digressions aside, this proved absolutely nothing, but it really was a fascinating presentation. a great program overall, in fact -- we had an ABC specialist from England who talked about sightings of leopards in Scotland and that sort of thing, and a major nutball who did an hour on how the Parthenon was actually a gigantic wind instrument and explained it all with mystery math. (sorry, the most obvious google searches don't turn up anything on that one, and i don't want to spend too much time on it.)

the two best speakers were folklorists. there was David Hufford, who wrote a book called The Terror that Comes in the Night, about the mythology surrounding sleep paralysis. every culture in the world has some sort of mythology to explain it, usually involving ghosts or black magic of some sort. it's fascinating stuff -- in the Philippines, many people still believe it's the cause of bangungot, or Sudden Unexplained Death Syndrome, in which people (mostly adolescent boys and young men) die inexplicably in their sleep. and hey, if you've ever experienced it, it's easy to understand how it could be heart-failure-inducing.

the other folklorist was Jan Harold Brunvand, author of The Vanishing Hitchhiker and several other books about urban legends. if you're really sick of movies about urban legends, blame him -- he's the guy who made them famous. his books inspired the creation of alt.folklore.urban, which ended up being one of the busiest newsgroups on usenet, which spawned snopes.com, and the rest is history.

for a while

marq and i considered trying to produce a documentary for public access TV on DC-area ULs, since there are a considerable number of them, the most notable being the ever-popular Goatman. (i'm quite disappointed with Wikipedia's article on him, because it's missing a ton of information, including the hilarious origin story; i'll have to see about adding to it.) for some reason, Prince George's County, MD (which is where i grew up) has an unusually high concentration of local mythology. maybe it's just that the area has so much history compared to most of the US, although you'd think DC itself and other surrounding counties would have comparably elaborate mythology, and they really don't.

(although northern Virginia, in addition to being the home of Bunnyman, is loaded with stories about Civil War ghosts, its creepiest legend, about the second Battle of Bull Run, is almost certainly true: that with nearly 20,000 casualties on the battlefield, Bull Run ran red with the blood of the dead and wounded. my dad used to take us there for a picnic every year on the anniversary of the final battle and tell us the story again. which is only slightly less bizarre if you know that his name was Robert Lee Tanner, proudly named for Robert E. Lee, and that from the time of the civil war until my brother and i were born, nearly every child's middle name was Lee. my grandmother wanted me to be named Nancy Lee. thank god my parents were focused on earlier ancestry when i was born...)

anyway, i kind of regret that we never actually made the documentary. it would've been loads of fun.

what was the local mythology where you grew up?