Martinex1: Back in the Bronze Age I was frequently mesmerized by the possibility of mysterious things. Perhaps it was my age, but back then it seemed like movies, books, magazines, and comics were focused on the odd and the unexplained, the eerie and the strange. Television seemed to play a particularly important role in highlighting these types of mysteries.
In grade school, how many lunch periods were spent discussing UFOs, ESP, ghosts, power of the pyramids, life on Mars, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, or the Bermuda Triangle? If a TV show spotlighted a "True Story" or "Real Event" involving these oddities, it certainly left its mark on the playground crowd.
And I am sure my curiosity about such things caused some sleepless nights and unwarranted worry. One of my favorite games was Milton Bradley's Bermuda Triangle with its magnetic storm cloud and vanishing ships. Back then I was frequently reading about Flight 19 and missing squadrons.
Television fueled the imagination with shows like Project UFO, That's Incredible, Unsolved Mysteries, and In Search Of...
And of course there was the Steve Austin and Bigfoot confrontation from The Six Million Dollar Man!
Were you captivated by the frightening tales of the unknown? Which of the strange tales weighed heavy on your mind? Did you lose sleep thinking about the weird possibilities? What pop culture pieces played into your paranoia? Or did you see Bigfoot, a UFO, or men from Mars? Was television the catalyst of your interest and which shows related to these topics were your favorites?
Today let's discuss the weird and wild and the influence of television on the imagination! Cheers!
18 comments:
I remember all that stuff quite well - all of that paranormal stuff seemed to be really popular in the latter half of the 1970s especially, and I ate up a bunch of it while I was still in grade school. Loved shows like "In Search of..." in particular.
I think Bigfoot/Sasquatch, followed by the Loch Ness Monster, fascinated me the most. Bigfoot more so, since I grew up in Oregon, and the Pacific Northwest (everything from BC to northern California) was supposed to be its 'natural habitat.' I remember after watching some TV special (or maybe an episode 'In Search of...') on Bigfoot, I kept seeing mysterious creatures in the forest across the road from our house.
I was the same, Marti. I was fascinated with all of these things which, in addition to the comics, made the world of my childhood a very imaginative place indeed.
Beyond the television and the spinner racks (and the public library), however, the true hub of all things occult, extraterrestrial and supernatural was ... the supermarket checkout!
I recall there were always little books on UFO's, alien pyramids, and the like cunningly hidden among the Soap Opera Digests and TV Guides, which I did sometimes manage to wear my parents into buying for me. My grandmother also was a regular buyer of the National Enquirer, and it regularly featured at least one story on these topics. I still remember one which talked about a child being haunted by a demon with a pig's face, and something about it scared me into sleeping with the covers over my head for my months.
Good times! Have a wonderful weekend all!
Mrs. and I always enjoyed the UFO strain of the abnormal sightings and kept reading about them over the decades. There are some fascinating (well, to our mind) tidbits to UFOs that we learned in the past decade.
- With the smart phone, UFO sightings (and Loch Ness, Big Foot) have dropped to zero. There should be a picture nowadays, to support the claim, lol!
- The term "flying saucer" is a misquote. In the 1940s or so, a man in Arizona (?) observed 3 triangular ships flying together as one, as if they were a "flying saucer." Newspapers picked up the term "flying saucer." Immediately, the world was awash in flying saucer observations, lol.
Well, it's 95 and sunny in Chicago land. Enjoy the day!
I grew up on the other side of the US, and also had Bigfoot concerns. Out local version was the Skunk Ape. Made for a tense late night dog walk.
It may have really been kicked off in the late 60s. We got Von Danikens Chariot of the Gods. It tied together UFOs and pyramids, and suddenly we are looking at medieval illustrations saying Copernicus saw a UFO. At the same time, we got the Patterson Bigfoot film, and Charles Berlitz's book on Atlantis, which seemed to jive with the new age ideas of the day.
I loved this stuff - Betty and Barney Hill alien abduction set the tone.
Two things that came at the tail end of the Bronze Age were Roswell and Nostradamus.
Jeff - Betty and Barney Hill! I was raking my mind about that TV show in the mid 70s! I just did a little googling thanks to you!
Anyhow, I just did some looking for an objective treatment of their story... it's there but takes some digging. Apparently Barney thought it was always an airplane but Betty was insistent it was a UFO. At one point she thought a street light was a UFO too... So...
Doggone - another childhood bubble has been burst! Well, there is still the X-File reruns!
I came across the Six Million Dollar Man on tv this year, first time since I was a kid.
Lee Majors appears to be at best 5'7" tall. The producers of SM$M could have gotten an average sized adult to play Bigfoot and the size difference still would have been huge!
Yoyo
Yeah, I was always into all the "unexplained" stuff, but I've never seen any aliens or ghosts or anything with my own eyes. I hope at least some of those things are true, because I think the world is more interesting with weird stuff in it, but I'd like to see some irrefutable proof.
And if nothing else, all those weird phenomena are great material for my writing!
Mike - I don't know what qualifies as "weird" but it seems like reality of physics as we know it thus far, is pretty weird. That things get smaller as you go faster, that time slows down as you go faster, that only 5% of the universe's behavior is explained by the matter and energy we know of and 95% is dark matter and dark energy... yowza... that's weird to me, lol.
I think all those “mysteries” created a sense that anything could happen. Our generation was definitely impacted by that. Perhaps it gives a sense of hope and wonder. From Scooby-Doo to E.T. that type of stuff was on our minds. Despite being scary I think it also conversely created hopefulness and a want for adventure.
Concurring with Jeff--It was that Erich von Daniken guy that got it all started with those two books of his from the late 60's, remember? CHARIOTS OF THE GODS and GODS FROM OUTER SPACE. It took a few years, but they really took off in the early/mid-70's, and it seems like they were the basis for just about that entire craze of we-are-not-alone pseudo-science that overwhelmed pop culture for a few years, there. My Mom got those books, and believed all of it (she's always been very much a "I saw it on TV/in a magazine/on the internet-- so it MUST be true" type of information-consumer. This has been a problem, tbh--). I, being a doofy, geeky adolescent, also believed ALL of it at the time--- not a bit discriminating in my acceptance that unsourced photos and un-verified claims in a book or on TV. There wasn't a ghost, alien, loch ness-type monster (our local lake in Michigan supposedly had one at the time), Big-Foot, Goat-man, or Lost Civilization, etc, that didn't seem to be OBVIOUSLY true and real to me. Let us just say that age turned me into a much healthier skeptic (as I'm sure it does to all of us).
But the seeds of that skepticism really were planted early in the process by two things:
1) The Nazca Line geo-glyphs. Man, these are the coolest projects ever. And throughout this whole craze, they were one of the most common examples of "Proof" of ancient alien presences-- based almost entirely on the given assumption that it would have been "impossible" to create these sprawling figures without a viewpoint from a low-flying spacecraft (or similar). End of discussion. And even at the time I remember thinking. . . "or you could make a scale drawing, and measure what you were doing from that". And this was before I'd taken any drafting classes in high school. And you don't even need much basic math at all to accomplish it. Really, just marked strings and a lot of attention to detail.
2) The fact that competing theorists tended to dismiss each other's realm of paranormality as utterly crackpot nonesense. And von Daniken was not at all immune to this, as he was clearly dismissive and contemptuous of the folks putting forth explanations involving, say, Lost Atlanteans. . . or legitimate Angels. Pretty sure he was not a big proponent of ghost-based theories, either. So the clamor of whose pseudo-science gets to claim priority REALLY throws a cold light of hard skepticism on all of them, naturally.
These days, I'm just astonished at the hold this stuff had on me-- although I still do love it from an entertainment perspective!
HB
Charlie: You're right, that is plenty weird. But there's not a ton of empirical evidence for that stuff either; I think a lot of the proofs are mathematical, which would be fine ... if I understood the math :)
Oh I just loved contemplating such things back in the Bronze Age.
And yes TV did perpetuate things. Like PROJECT BLUE BOOK, and especially
IN SEARCH OF a favorite for sure.
Just a great age to have fun with those subjects!
Like everyone else today, I had a penchant for the paranormal. In particular, there was a series of books I bought, paperbacks from the local drug store. Frustratingly, I cannot recall the title. But the books were compendiums of mysterious /paranormal/ spooky events and stories; usually each was several pages long. The 'grabber' was that all the described events were actual and confirmed. Of course that can't be ascertained now, especially since I can't identify the books themselves. At any rate, they kept me up many summer nights...
Mike! I feel your math pain! I have tried at least 3 times to read "Why does E = MC2" and each time I die around Chapter 7. (It's where they start graphing 2-dimensional hyperbolas and one of the two axis represents 3 dimensions...)
And of course (!) anyone with a high-school degree can understand this per the reviews, LOL.
If only I had never attended the university, I might be able to get through it LOL.
Regarding time slowing down... that is used in the GPS system and other things. It is factual not theoretical at this point. My fav sci fi book Enders Game utilizes that as a means of keeping "Captain Ender" young, as I recall. Good stuff.
One of the worst things about living to a ripe old age is even the things that are still around, aren't around any more... LOL!
Having worked nights for much of my career, Art Bell's Coast To Coast was a big part of my nights. For those who still get a chance to dip their toes in the paranormal pond know that we no long have UFOs. They're now Unidentified Ariel Phenomenon. I want to say UAF but it's "P", UAP.
Two things not mentioned yet are crop circles and ESP. Remember when those were such big things? Where have all the crop circles gone? Speaking of ESP, and I knew you were going to say that, there are currently several institutes around the world that are working on mapping the brain. They hope to be able to record the brain during dreams and then "play back' what images we dreamed about! I know, I was just thinking "Brainstorm". Eventually, they (who is this "they" they keep talking about?) want to be able to download our brain, store the knowledge and preserve it for future generations. I was talking with my niece who's studying to be a nurse. They work with mannequins to practice assessments and whatnot. I told her once they can download and then upload our experiences, the patients may be fake, but the cases would be real...
Last thing, I know this is unrelated but when has that ever stopped me... Remember the "You Are There" films from school? Walter Cronkite would do the set up and then inform us that everything was just as it was, except... "You Are There"!!!
(Midnight on the water
I saw the ocean's daughter
Walking on a wave chicane
Staring as she called my name
And I can't get it out of my head
No, I can't get it out of my head
Now my old world is gone for dead
Cos I can't get it out of my head
Breakdown on the shoreline
Can't move, it's an ebb tide
Morning don't get here till night
Searching for her silver light
And I can't get it out of my head
No, I can't get it out of my head
Now my old world is gone for dead
Cos I can't get it out of my head, no no
Bank job in the city
Robin hood and William Tell and Ivanhoe and Lancelot, they don't envy me
Sitting till the sun goes down
In dreams the world keep going round and round
And I can't get it out of my head
No, I can't get it out of my head
Now my old world is gone for dead
Cos I can't get it out of my head, no no
No, I can't get it out of my head
No, I can't get it out of my head
Now my old world is gone for dead
Cos I can't get it out of my head, no no no no).
Prowl-- bringing us back around to the original topic of the post, I'd been meaning to mention a related TV series that sprung from the ESP arm of this craze: THE SIXTH SENSE. Anyone remember that one? Very early 70's-- w/ Gary Collins? Mostly I just remember a) that I had to beg to stay up past my bedtime to watch it, and that, b) it then usually scared the bejeepers out of me, even though I remember almost no details about it at all. I. . . suspect it was probably a rather dull show, if I were to revisit it. . .
HB
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