Reader News for July 17, 2013

Welcome to another Reader News! Two big announcements this time around.

David Lee Summers, who recently did a guest post here on Researching Alternate History, is an astronomer and writer/publisher. Now he's brought his two careers together by publishing a science fiction anthology of stories set on planets discovered by the Kepler Space Telescope.

A Kepler's Dozen: Thirteen Stories About Distant Worlds That Really Exist is out in paperback and ebook on Amazon, Smashwords, B&N, and direct from Summers' publisher Hadrosaur Press. This is probably the first such anthology. As astronomers find more and more exoplanets, as planets outside our solar system are called, I suspect it won't be the last.

Lexa Cain has just signed a book contract. Her book SOUL CUTTER is about a teen who outs fake psychics on YouTube and overcomes her skepticism when she confronts a legendary Soul Cutter in Egypt. It's going to be published by MuseItUp Publishing in December 2013.

Congratulations David and Lexa!

Pterodactyl sightings in America

Let's descend into a bit of silliness. This is, after all, a fiction blog as well as a history blog.

We all remember the pterodactyl from when we were kids, that weird birdlike creature with the funky head. It died out with the dinosaurs, right?

Wrong, say some true believers. Pterodactyls have been spotted all over the world, especially in Texas, which has had several waves of pterodactyl sightings. Pterodactyls have landed on mobile homes, buzzed schoolteachers on their way to work, and generally caused mayhem across the state.

Native Americans believed in the Thunderbird, a giant bird seen in the skies of the American Southwest. Cryptozoologists (people who study unexplained animal sightings) claim the Thunderbird legend may be evidence of pterodactyl sightings. Of course the legend recounts a big feathered bird and not a reptile, but whatever.

Creationists have also gotten into the game. Many of the "pterodactyls are alive" websites use the sightings as evidence that the Earth couldn't be millions of years old, otherwise these creatures would have died out.

The sightings have been happening for some time now and even the Tombstone Epitaph got into the game back in 1890, claiming that some cowboys bagged one. Many photos of the supposed creature have arisen. This is just one of them.

While I have a hard time believing in the Thunderbird/living pterodactyl, I do find the idea charming. Perhaps I'll write a story about it one day!


I took this photo from the Texas Cryptid Hunter blog, which has a refreshingly skeptical take on the phenomenon. The image is not original to them. 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. :-)

Globsters! Mysterious giant lumps of flesh washed up on beaches

The A to Z blogfest continues, and the letter G can only mean one thing--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 saw 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 globsters 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]

Ectoplasm! or, "I sneeze dead people"

This unfortunate woman is Mary Marshall, who had the poor manners to let spirits of the dead dribble out of her nostrils like mucous during flu season. She was part of a family of Canadian spiritualists who during the early 1900s held seances in their home.

That gunky stuff was known as ectoplasm, a paranormal Goo From Beyond. Ectoplasm appeared in seances and spiritualist photographs around the turn of the century. This Goo From Beyond is, of course, a parlor trick. This photo seems to show tissue paper with photos cut from magazines.

Ectoplasm would issue from the bodily orifices of the medium during the seance. It normally came from the nose or mouth, but could also come out the ears, eyes, nipples, and, as the photo below suggests, regions further to the South.

Ectoplasm has an aversion to light and thus only appears in the darkened rooms of the seance. This is convenient in that it keeps observers from getting to close a look, although these flash photos must have turned at least a few people into skeptics.

Spiritualism really kicked off in the United States due to the appalling loss of life during the Civil War. For more on that, check out my article Spiritualism during the American Civil War. It still exists as a movement today, although ectoplasm has fallen out of favor. A pity. I really like to see people sneeze up spirits.

Top photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Bottom photo from the fun Fortean blog Who Forted?, which has a lengthy quote from a Spiritualist "explaining" ectoplasm.