June 30, 1908--BOOM!

Today marks the 100th anniversary of what has become known as the Tunguska Event, "a massive explosion (probably 10-15 megatons) that occurred near the Podkamennaya (Lower Stony) Tunguska River in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai of Russia, at around 7:14 a.m. (0:14 UT, 7:02 a.m. local solar time) on June 30, 1908 (June 17 in the Julian calendar, in use locally at the time)" (and thanks for that, Wikipedia!).

Its exact cause remains a mystery, though each generation seems to come up with its own set of Zeitgeist-ly explanations: herald for TEOTWAWKI, an extremely pissed-off shaman, (gotta love that one!), a UFO crash, collision with a stray bit of antimatter or a very tiny black black hole, the leavings of ancient astronauts... almost as many as (and often overlapping) those for the extinction of the dinosaurs*.

And the debate still rages (lots o' way-cool pics!).



By the way, and to my surprise, the TE has played a significant role in popular culture. See Tunguska Event in Fiction and note that equally anomalous literary light Thomas Pynchon has used it as a plot device in Against the Day (New York Times review here).

I love this stuff. If I were a party-throwing kind of creature I would so use this as an excuse to gather like-minded individuals, get 'em drunk, and blow up stuff.



* You knew there was going to be a footnote somewhere in this post, didn't you? Seriously, did you really think I could get through an entire post without a David Foster Wallace-esque footnote? Shame on you!

Anyway, dinosaur extinctions... damned if I can find my copy, much less recall the title, but the textbook I used for my college evolution class (taught by the late Perry C. Holt) had this great quote** by...someone...listing a slew of hypotheses for the extinction of the dinosaurs ranging from the quite plausible to the patently absurd ("hunted by little green men..."), which I found gut-wrenchingly funny at the time.

** Incidently, the quote was used as the caption to a small, seemingly irrelevant, illustration. We in the class learned quickly that anything, absolutely anything in that particular book, no matter how marginal, might form the basis for an exam question*** and so you'd better believe we read it all. Dr. Holt believed in academic rigor.

*** We used to come into class and find mysterious quotes from a fellow named "Poire" (with an accent aigu over the "e") on the blackboard which I, ever the OCD candidate, dutifully copied into my notebook. Sure enough, the content often appeared as semi-humorous yet point-worthy exam questions and on the final I won big-ass bonus points on one of the essays for deducing who, exactly, "Poire" was****.

**** Take a wild-ass guess. It was the final joke in a series of subtleries that almost made me wish I hadn't started the rumor that Dr. Holt had boinked Charles Darwin's wife.

Strangely Enough...Metaweirdness

Earlier I mentioned my fascination with all things Fortean, strange, and weird, though I hasten to add I swallow none of this stuff without a side order of skepticism--Sturgeon's Law still applies and one must, therefore, be careful with what one believes. Still, it's fun to think there might be sea serpents, undiscovered animals, ghostly doings, gifts of prophecy, Mothmen, UFOs, mysterious fires and lights, lost treasures, and so forth.

Blame it on my babysitter.

Poor thing, for a couple of years she got saddled with a yakky child just about every other Saturday night because, well, I loved an audience--there were no kids my age in my neighborhood and, let's be honest, I was too damned weird for most of the kids at school. Even my parents had limited tolerance for my Aspergerian perseverations, and so, basically, I had no one with which to share the current week's obsession...except for unsuspecting relatives and hapless babysitters.

But Lisa A. was one smart cookie and quickly figured out that giving me something interesting to read would shut me up for the entire evening, thus allowing her to do homework, read teen magazines, chat with her boyfriend by phone, or whatever it was teenage babysitters did for amusement in the 'Sixties. On one particular occasion she tossed me a copy of the Scholastic Book Services (and there's a piece of nostalgia for the Baby Boomers--remember getting those flimsy little paperback catalogs in school once a month?) hottest offering, Strangely Enough! by C. B. Colby--an anthology of weird-but-supposedly-true tales.

She should have just given me crack--crack is less addictive.

The Money Pit at Oak Island, ghostly apparitions, haunted sentry boxes, ghost ships, flying saucers, mysterious TV signals, the strange behavior of felines (is your snoozing puddy actually King of the Cats?)--oh, it was great stuff! Over the next few years I wound up amassing a HUGE collection of similarly-themed paperbacks, discarded issues of Fate magazine, and UFO books, which was easy enough to do since this stuff was all the rage way back then.*

But that's not the story I'm here to tell.

Are you familiar with Michael Chabon? Author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Wonder Boys, and, most recently, The Yiddish Policemen's Union? Well, a few years ago Chabon gave a lecture in which he revealed that not only had he read Strangely Enough as a child, but its author, C. B. Colby, lived at the end of the same street he did and when movers were emptying Colby's house years later Chabon saw them carry out what looked suspiciously like... a golem (be sure to read "Where Things Get Weird" later, but not right this minute).

Spooky, ain't it? Oh, wait; there's more. Chabon went on to say that C. B. Colby was actually a Holocaust survivor named Joseph Adler who wrote of his experiences in a memoir, The Book of Hell.

Except Adler wasn't a Holocaust survivor at all; he was a former Nazi named Viktor Fischer.

Let that bit of weirdness sink in for a minute.

Now, let's get to the real weirdness-- there was a C. B. Colby, he did write a slew of informative books for grade-school kids including Strangely Enough, but he was not an ex-Nazi nor was he a Holocaust survivor--Michael Chabon made it up.

(see "Fiction, Hoax or Neither? A Literary Dust-Up" and "Revenge of the Regressive Avant-Garde.")

Certain literary types went absolutely ape-shit, as certain literary types are apt to do (witness the furor over James Frey's otherwise inconsequential piece o' fluff A Million Little Pieces), griping (with, maybe, some, but only some, justification) that Chabon had no right to appropriate the "Jewish Experience" for his own, personal aggrandizement, nor should he have presented fiction as fact without a suitable warning label.

(see "Anatomy of A Hoax: An Interview With Paul Maliszewski," the man who broke the story)

Oh, pish-posh. They're just pissed because they got taken in by a storyteller. Chabon tells stories. We all tell stories and we all embellish them to greater or lesser degrees so as to entertain out audience. That's what storytellers do! Debate the ethics all you want, but I've never turned to the fictionistas when I'm looking for hard-core facts; I automatically assume a significantly high Embellishment Factor. Then again, my personality is such that I enjoy sifting signal from noise.

The brilliance of Michael Chabon is not only did he present a perfectly plausible weird story in his lectures (and let's be honest here, careful listeners received ample warning that what was to follow was not strictly true), he generated an entire meta-story as well.

Bottom line? Truth is stranger than fiction.

Strangely enough.


* The few friends I did have shared my interests and Saturdays often found us haunting dingy thrift stores in dodgy parts of town (especially the Cracker Barrel and the Nine-To-Nine Newstand in Basic City), scrounging for whatever coffee-stained, water-warped, mildew-scented treasures by Brad Steiger, Hans Holzer, and Frank Edwards we could get out grubby hands upon--rarely could we afford new copies, priced as they were at 75 cents, 95 cents, and, occasionally, an astounding $1.25.

Tomorrow Is Sea Serpent Day...

...for some unfathomable reason, but for lovers of the strange, the outre, and the downright weird, August 6th is The Day (see the Cryptomundo post)!

--Dateline: New York. On this day in 1890 wife-killer William Kemmler became the first person to be executed in the electric chair. His last words were "Take it easy and do it properly; I'm in no hurry." They didn't and he had to be shocked a second time with 2000 volts at which point his body caught fire.

--Dateline: Hiroshima, 1945. The Enola Gay drops the first atomic bomb, codenamed Little Boy, ever used as a weapon. Nine years later Japan retaliates by releasing the first of many, many Godzilla movies.

--Dateline: New York again. On this day in 1902 gangster, bootlegger, and numbers runner Dutch Schultz was born. But for his death, Dutch would be nothing more than an obscure footnote in history; however, after a hit man shot him while urinating and as he lay dying in a hospital room, a police stenographer copied down his rambling, surreal, and downright bizarre last words, providing one hell of a writing prompt for such authors as William S. Burroughs, Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson, and others.

--Dateline: Milwaukee. On this day in 1966 science fiction writer Cordwainer Smith died. Smith, whose real name was Paul Linebarger and who happened to be Sun Yat-Sen's godson, wrote some of the Strangest. Science Fiction. Ever.

--Dateline: Gloucester Harbor, Massachusetts. On this day in 1817 locals spotted what was described as a huge sea serpent. Coincidentally, also on August 6 in 1848 the crew of the Daedelus spotted a sea serpent off the Atlantic coast of South Africa

But the Big Event, the One that ties all this together, is the birth of Charles Fort in 1874. Fort spent something like thirty years studying newspapers and compiling notes on, well, the strange, the outre, and the downright weird, events and...things...not readily explainable by "Mainstream Science:" mysterious fires and lights, falls of frogs and fish from the sky, strange noises, unusual aerial phenomena (including what were later called UFOs); however, though some claim otherwise, he maintained a certain skepticism--and a significant sense of humor--towards his research:

"Before I looked into the case of Ambrose Small, I was attracted to it by another seeming coincidence. That there could be any meaning in it seemed so preposterous that, as influenced by much experience, I gave it serious thought. About six years before the disappearance of Ambrose Small, Ambrose Bierce had disappeared. Newspapers all over the world had made much of the mystery of Ambrose Bierce. But what could the disappearance of one Ambrose, in Texas, have to do with the disappearance of another Ambrose in Canada? Was somebody collecting Ambroses? There was in these questions an appearance of childishness that attracted my respectful attention."
--Wild Talents

I was fascinated by this stuff as a kid in the 'Sixties, which was virtually unavoidable since the paperback racks of the time were overflowing with anthologies of strange phenomena and UFOs were all the rage. In fact, a lot of my interest in science stemmed from reading about all the bizarre, unexplained stuff going on in the world, so it should come as no surprise that I regard Ol' Charlie as a personal saint.

Fort's legacy lives on in the British magazine Fortean Times.