In 1953, a non-fiction book published by Maj. Donald Keyhoe, a U.S. Marine Corps naval aviator, entitled "Flying Saucers from Outer Space" dazzled people interested in the UFO phenomenon by illustrating that high-ranking military officials were extremely concerned about UFOs. The book is highly recommended for those interested in the subject.
In 1956, Columbia Pictures released what would become a science fiction film classic, "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers." With great special effects by Ray Harryhausen, the film depicted a devastating attack of Earth by beings from another world.
Saturday, October 22, 2011
UFOs: It Has Begun
This classic UFO documentary from 1976 hosted by Rod Serling has moved into cult status.
The Men Who Killed Kennedy
Here is the first episode of the acclaimed 1988 documentary from Nigel Turner about the alleged conspiracy surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Sci-fi fantasy adventure ebook THE NINTH LEG
The greatest accomplishment a writer can achieve in this life is finishing a novel. Much of my adult life was spent writing articles for newspapers located across the country. Starting off as a freelance writer for newspapers in Pennsylvania, I climbed a long ladder until I was finally hired as a full-time reporter. Six months later, I was promoted to the top beat - local government reporter. I held that position for more than 10 years, moving from one newspaper to another, until I fnally realized that my greatest desire was to pen a novel. It was always that, but life as a reporter for years blurred my true goal.
Last March, I finally accomplished my dream when I put the finishing touches on my sci-fi fantasy adventure novel, THE NINTH LEG. It was the culmination of so many things - my love for writing, my love for classic science fiction stories and movies, my desire to actually write a full novel. Now, finally, it is out there. I am extremely proud to present to the world my first complete novel, THE NINTH LEG. If you're a fan of spectacular science fiction fantasy adventure, I believe you will find worth in this book. Please click on the image below to read details about my book, as well as to read sample chapters from it.
Last March, I finally accomplished my dream when I put the finishing touches on my sci-fi fantasy adventure novel, THE NINTH LEG. It was the culmination of so many things - my love for writing, my love for classic science fiction stories and movies, my desire to actually write a full novel. Now, finally, it is out there. I am extremely proud to present to the world my first complete novel, THE NINTH LEG. If you're a fan of spectacular science fiction fantasy adventure, I believe you will find worth in this book. Please click on the image below to read details about my book, as well as to read sample chapters from it.
How to quit smoking.
While my previous posting outlined the problems of a cigarette addict, it offered no solutions. I know a solution - imprisonment.
After much deep thinking, I believe the best way to quit smoking is to lock the addict up in a jail cell for a week or two. Maybe some bright entrepreneur could launch his or her new "service" that makes people stop smoking? Here's how it could work:
First, customers pay a fee and sign some paperwork. The paperwork gives the company providing the service the ability to imprison the customer in a jail for a specified amount of time. During the stay in the jail cell, the customer is provided with all of the things necessary to sustain life - food, water, television and Internet access - but no tobacco products. When the service is completed, the customer should be free of his or her tobacco addiction. It could be as simple as that!
After much deep thinking, I believe the best way to quit smoking is to lock the addict up in a jail cell for a week or two. Maybe some bright entrepreneur could launch his or her new "service" that makes people stop smoking? Here's how it could work:
First, customers pay a fee and sign some paperwork. The paperwork gives the company providing the service the ability to imprison the customer in a jail for a specified amount of time. During the stay in the jail cell, the customer is provided with all of the things necessary to sustain life - food, water, television and Internet access - but no tobacco products. When the service is completed, the customer should be free of his or her tobacco addiction. It could be as simple as that!
Cigarettes - my personal destruction!
Cigarettes are killing me. I know this, but yet I am a slave to cigarettes. My budget always needs to include consideration for cigarettes. I'm addicted. I'm a cigarette junkie. I can't stop smoking. The addiction has me by the throat and won't let go.
When I was a child, I hated the smell of cigarettes. My father smoked cigarettes in my presence all the time. So did my grandmothers, my uncles and my aunts. There was always cigarettes getting smoked around me. The smell made me throw up more than once.
But then I began smoking. Why? I don't know. I hated them, but I started smoking them and within a week I was addicted. All these years later I'm still smoking. I attempt to stop sometimes. I make a point of it. But then I find myself in a store buying more cigarettes. It's a disease. It's a horrible, terrible disease. There are people in this world getting rich on my and others addiction. How can they live with themselves? Are they happy to be rich off something that kills people?
When I was a child, I hated the smell of cigarettes. My father smoked cigarettes in my presence all the time. So did my grandmothers, my uncles and my aunts. There was always cigarettes getting smoked around me. The smell made me throw up more than once.
But then I began smoking. Why? I don't know. I hated them, but I started smoking them and within a week I was addicted. All these years later I'm still smoking. I attempt to stop sometimes. I make a point of it. But then I find myself in a store buying more cigarettes. It's a disease. It's a horrible, terrible disease. There are people in this world getting rich on my and others addiction. How can they live with themselves? Are they happy to be rich off something that kills people?
Friday, October 21, 2011
Movies that feature disembodied living heads.
In my new sci-fi fantasy ebook for Kindle, THE NINTH LEG, Adolf Hitler's disembodied head is kept alive inside the body of an artificial, robotic body. But the concept of living, disembodied heads is something that Hollywood has exploited in the past, sometimes effectively and sometimes not so effectively. Below are trailers from some of the movies that feature disembodied but still living heads.
"The Thing That Couldn't Die"
"The Brain That Wouldn't Die"
"They Saved Hitler's Brain"
"The Thing with Two Heads"
RE-CREATION: The documentary that was never produced.
In early 2010, I submitted a treatment proposal for a documentary series called "Re-Creation" to a production company in New York City. The series would have attempted to re-create certain events in an effort to prove or disprove certain controversial theories regarding a gamut of mysteries. The pilot episode was called "The Cattle Mutilation Experiment." The episode would have shown whether humans and/or predators could have been responsible for the many mysterious cattle mutilations that occur across the world on a regular basis, or show that some other force, perhaps extraterrestrial, is responsible.
The production company responded to me with great interest in my concept. I went to New York and met with some of the company's representatives to talk about the series. I was asked to find the regular cast members for the series and have them sign deal memorandums. It was a lot of work, but I was able to accomplish it within about a month. Then, I was informed that cable networks such as The Discovery Channel, National Geographic Channel and Animal Planet were interested in possibly carrying the series.
But as the months went by, interest in producing the series began to wane. That was unfortunate because I thought it would have made an interesting series. What do you think? Here is a link to the original treatment I wrote for the show. There were other proposed episodes that I thought up later, but I did not include those.
The production company responded to me with great interest in my concept. I went to New York and met with some of the company's representatives to talk about the series. I was asked to find the regular cast members for the series and have them sign deal memorandums. It was a lot of work, but I was able to accomplish it within about a month. Then, I was informed that cable networks such as The Discovery Channel, National Geographic Channel and Animal Planet were interested in possibly carrying the series.
But as the months went by, interest in producing the series began to wane. That was unfortunate because I thought it would have made an interesting series. What do you think? Here is a link to the original treatment I wrote for the show. There were other proposed episodes that I thought up later, but I did not include those.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
The Blog of James Quirk: Hitler battles Vlad Dracula in THE NINTH LEG!
The Blog of James Quirk: Hitler battles Vlad Dracula in THE NINTH LEG!: Adolf Hitler and Vlad Dracula are snatched out of the past, transported to the year 2337, and forced to battle each other in a fight to the ...
Robert Osborne video
Here's a video of of Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne announcing that he'll be returning to action December 1. For movie buffs, this is great news. Osborne knows his movies, and his intros and outros to TCM's primetime offerings have been missed since he went on vacation early this past summer.
The Blog of James Quirk: Imagine Hitler's head in a robot!
The Blog of James Quirk: Imagine Hitler's head in a robot!: The primary villain in my new science fiction fantasy adventure novel, THE NINTH LEG, is none other than notorious historical mass murderer ...
More Halloween chills - Horror Hotel!
Another fine example of how older, black-and-white horror films can be a lot scarier than anything they come out with today. This chiller from 1960 stars the great Christopher Lee in a story involving a group of undying New England witches who kill the living to stay alive. For your viewing enjoyment, and again with a tip of the hat to the magical Google Videos, here is "Horror Hotel," a.k.a., "City of the Dead."
They're coming to get you, Barbara!
Thanks to the magic of Google Videos, here is George A. Romero's 1968 horror classic, "Night of the Living Dead."
Sci-fi Kindle ebook THE NINTH LEG available across the globe!
Sci-fi fantasy adventure ebook THE NINTH LEG is available across the world ...
It's available in the United Kingdom, Germany, France and, of course, in North America.
From the product description: Experience the terrifying exploits of Don Black, a loving husband who is kidnapped by aliens intent on using him for scientific experimentation on their home planet. The journey, however, takes an unexpected detour when the alien spacecraft carrying Don crashes on a planet teeming with carnivorous monsters and ruled by gigantic, telepathic spiders. Making matters worse, another race of aliens led by a time-snatched Adolf Hitler arrives with plans to assume control of the planet and use its unlimited resources to conquer the galaxy. Can Don help prevent Hitler and his army of space Nazis from causing another Holocaust, this time one on a galactic scale that targets all intelligent life forms?
It's available in the United Kingdom, Germany, France and, of course, in North America.
From the product description: Experience the terrifying exploits of Don Black, a loving husband who is kidnapped by aliens intent on using him for scientific experimentation on their home planet. The journey, however, takes an unexpected detour when the alien spacecraft carrying Don crashes on a planet teeming with carnivorous monsters and ruled by gigantic, telepathic spiders. Making matters worse, another race of aliens led by a time-snatched Adolf Hitler arrives with plans to assume control of the planet and use its unlimited resources to conquer the galaxy. Can Don help prevent Hitler and his army of space Nazis from causing another Holocaust, this time one on a galactic scale that targets all intelligent life forms?
Hitler battles Vlad Dracula in THE NINTH LEG!
Adolf Hitler and Vlad Dracula are snatched out of the past, transported to the year 2337, and forced to battle each other in a fight to the death in a gigantic dome constructed on the moon in the new sci-fi fantasy adventure ebook for Kindle, THE NINTH LEG.
From customer reviews of THE NINTH LEG: "The story has a truly unique plot as it melds together elements of sci-fi, classic monster movies, and historical fiction. ... All the classic sci-fi elements are there - time travel, futuristic barbarian sport, strange alien races - and are set to a fast-paced adventure that wouldn't be out of place on the big screen."
"This is an excellent story and I recommend it very highly. If you enjoy watching Alien Autopsy or the many conspiracy programs on TV, this book is for you. If you've been reading the covers of the tabloids for years and want a way to fit them all together, Mr. Quirk has done this for you."
"There is no recycling of old plot lines here. The book is very, very, original and that is what I enjoyed the most about this product."
From customer reviews of THE NINTH LEG: "The story has a truly unique plot as it melds together elements of sci-fi, classic monster movies, and historical fiction. ... All the classic sci-fi elements are there - time travel, futuristic barbarian sport, strange alien races - and are set to a fast-paced adventure that wouldn't be out of place on the big screen."
"This is an excellent story and I recommend it very highly. If you enjoy watching Alien Autopsy or the many conspiracy programs on TV, this book is for you. If you've been reading the covers of the tabloids for years and want a way to fit them all together, Mr. Quirk has done this for you."
"There is no recycling of old plot lines here. The book is very, very, original and that is what I enjoyed the most about this product."
UFO documentary classic
In 1979, a documentary film entitled "UFOs Are Real" was released into theaters. It still remains one of the most compelling films about extraterrestrial visitors ever produced.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Halloween or Christmas?.
It seems like every year the Christmas shopping season begins earlier than it did the year before. It's hard to believe that we're about two weeks away from Halloween, yet many big department stores are set up to sell Christmas stuff already. I was in K-Mart today at the Laurel Mall in Hazleton when I saw an entire section devoted to Christmas decorations. There were artificial Christmas trees, Christmas yard ornaments, Christmas lights ... everything you could want to decorate for Christmas. I just couldn't believe that Christmas is here already. Well, that's because it is not here yet.
Path of a Knower
The following article was originally published by UFO Digest in 2009.
Every person travels his or her own individual path through life that helps to establish his or her identity, and that identity in turn is expressed to the world through that person’s career, family, lifestyle, ideas and beliefs.
Life is not easy for anybody. Every person – regardless if they’re rich or poor, married or single, healthy or sick – faces personal issues on a regular basis that spark emotions ranging from pain and suffering to pleasure and happiness. Everybody is different yet they are all the same.
The beliefs that are formed in the mind of an individual can occur in a variety of ways. A person, for instance, could be conditioned as a child to harbor certain religious beliefs that are maintained by that person for the rest of his or her life.
Sometimes, however, a person develops a strong belief in something through experiences without the aid of conditioning. That is what happened to me with my belief in the extraterrestrial reality. Things happened at different points of my life that eventually established in my mind the knowledge that highly intelligent extraterrestrial beings are among us. If it were not for certain life events, I could have easily turned out to be a skeptic of the UFO/extraterrestrial phenomenon.
Regarding UFO/extraterrestrial belief patterns, a person can fall in to one of several categories:
I am a knower. I know extraterrestrial beings are here.
I was raised a Catholic in a small former coal mining village called Mahanoy Plane in northeastern Pennsylvania. The population of this small spot in the world in the 1970s when I was growing up was the same then as it is now, only a few hundred people. In 1976 I became an alter boy shortly after receiving my first communion, and I remained an alter boy for the next 10 years until I graduated from high school in 1986.
As a Catholic, I was taught as a child that bad people when they die go to Hell, the domain of the Devil. Although the notion of Hell and the Devil frightened me greatly as a child, I never feared ending up in Hell because I led a good life. I strived to be good.
Every young boy has nightmares sometimes, and I was no different. All sorts of monsters would visit my dreams during my childhood and cause me to wake up in terror. I was perplexed on occasion when I would wake up in the middle of the night and discover that I was unable to move. It would take a few minutes to snap out of this strange spell that caused my body to feel paralyzed but my brain to be wide awake – and in utter terror of my dilemma. Years later, I found out that what I was enduring during those horrifying moments was a phenomena called sleep paralysis. The mind has a built-in mechanism that paralyzes the body so a person doesn’t act out his or her dreams. Sometimes those mental wires don’t work properly and can cause a person to either sleep walk or put them in the state of sleep paralysis. I suffered from the latter malady several times.
I apparently suffered from sleep walking on occasion during the same time period in the mid- to late 1970s when I was seven-, eight-, and nine-years-old, only on those occasions I have no recollection of the incidents. My mother reported several times during my childhood that I had traipsed downstairs at nighttime to the living room where she and my father were watching television and scream-cried in terror of "monsters" in my bedroom. On these occasions, she said I would rush downstairs in hysterics, cry in terror about monsters and then return to my bedroom as if nothing had happened. Even as a child I had a fascination with these reports from mom because I never had any recollection whatsoever of the possible nightmares that caused me to make such a spectacle of myself in the middle of the night. Today I wonder whether these events were the result of simple nightmares or something even more terrifying and more real, but I will not venture to speculate further on that.
However, there is one strange thing that happened during my childhood that I know was not a dream, nightmare or a sleep paralysis episode. We lived in a tiny row home, and I shared the attic with my brother Dave, who is a year younger than me. The room was split with an open staircase, and Dave slept on one side of the room and I the other. There was a wall light at the top of the stairs that we usually kept on at night, and it happened to be turned on the night when something unearthly dropped in for a visit.
I was about eight or nine at the time when I woke up in the middle of the night to a loud, almost deafening electronic humming sound. Not unusual was that my thin blue blanket was covering my head, which is something I regularly did when I went to bed. Highly unusual – in addition to the humming sound – was that I could clearly see the shadow of a three-fingered claw-like hand moving up and down above my head. I was terrified. To my young mind, it was the Devil. I could conjure up no other explanation. "Who’s there?" I managed a couple of times, but the non-human hand just continued to get closer to my head and then farther away. It was like it was performing some odd religious rite. I could not gather up the courage to remove the blanket that was over my head to face whatever was attached to that claw, but I did peak out of it slightly in my brother’s direction. Dave appeared sound asleep. I started to yell his name. Dave did not budge, but that could have been due to the electronic humming sound, which I immediately realized was muffling my voice. My terror grew greater and I started to scream for my parents. Nobody came. I turned my focus back to the claw-like hand and tried to communicate with it again, but it just continued to move up and down, with thick outstretched fingers that came to points at the tips, above my head. I closed my eyes and started to pray. Every now and then I would open my eyes to see whether the hand was still there.
It was still there and I should have known it was still there because the humming sound was constant. I prayed and prayed and prayed.
The next thing I knew, it was bright outside and morning. But it wasn’t like I had a nightmare and woke up. It was like time had passed between the moment I was praying and the time I woke up. It wasn’t like waking from a nightmare at the breaking day. Something had happened late the night before, I passed out somehow, hours went by and then I awoke. The entire event lasted about 20 minutes and I was wide-awake the whole time. There was no doubt. It was not a dream.
Of course, when I told my mother about it in the morning, she did not believe it was real. I argued with her for about 30 minutes but she insisted that I only had a dream. It crossed my mind at the time that, "I’m only a kid and nobody is going to believe me." As the years went by, I sometimes told the story to friends and family members and many times the response was the same as my mother’s: "It must have been a dream."
For well over 10 years after the event, the only explanation I could muster was that the thing in my room was something satanic. I’ve always known that something was in my room that night and that it could not have been a dream. It was not until the late 1980s or early 1990s that my opinion about the event started to change.
The first time I had any knowledge that some people believed extraterrestrial beings were coming to Earth was in the late 1970s or early 1980s. I had watched science fiction films growing up such as "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers" and "War of the Worlds," and I even went to see "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" in a movie theater sometime in 1978. But I never seriously entertained the possibility that beings from other worlds were actually coming here during the first 10 or 11 years of my life. In either 1979 or 1980, my father was watching an episode of the TV series, "In Search Of …," a documentary that was hosted by Leonard Nimoy. The episode speculated on the possibility that beings from other worlds were coming to Earth in flying saucers. It was the first time I had ever been presented with information that extraterrestrials could actually be real. I was fascinated, but I didn’t really know what I thought about it until years later.
After watching shows on television in the late 1980s or early 1990s about people who claimed to be abducted by aliens, a bell started to sound off in my head. The night of the claw finally started to make sense, right down to the electronic humming sound. It wasn’t Lucifer who appeared in my bedroom that night, it was an alien!
Even though I embraced this new concept, I still had some doubt about an extraterrestrial reality. It was simply too fantastic. Besides, I would never be able to prove conclusively to anybody that an alien had indeed infiltrated my childhood sleeping quarters back in the 1970s to lull me into some weird shock because I was the only one awake to experience the event. I knew something very odd had happened, I knew for a fact there was something in my room that night no matter what anybody else said, and I knew that there was no way, no how that the event was a dream. I still know it and I’ll always know it. I also believe there’s a strong possibility that something more happened that night but that I have no conscious memory of it. I know for sure that when I was praying to God to save me that night, I was far from sleepy. I was frightened beyond belief and not at all feeling like a little shuteye.
The event that pushed me into the full "knower" category, however, did not occur until August 1994. This time I would walk away from a particular experience "knowing" with an absolute certainty that extraterrestrials are here. Ladies and gentlemen, when you see a huge flying machine that makes no sound whatsoever approach you in the black of night and hover a mere two or three stories above your head, you suddenly "know" the truth.
It’s funny how when a major event occurs in one’s life, that person can remember other details that surround the incident which otherwise would have been forgotten.
It was a warm August day in 1994 when a long-time friend, "Nigel," called me up and asked if I’d be interested in going fishing. I feel somewhat compelled to use an alias for my friend because he’s a college professor and it is unclear what the reaction would be of his peers if it was discovered that he at one time saw an Unidentified Flying Object that he believes may have had an extraterrestrial origin. I talked to Nigel recently about our sighting, but I didn’t bother asking him if he’d mind whether his real name appeared in this article. I would not want to jeopardize his credibility in any way. When it comes to the UFO/extraterrestrial problem, however, the simple fact is there are many out there who still view those who had a direct experience with otherworldly visitors and/or their craft as "nuts."
When Nigel called me in 1994, he told me that, through a family member, he obtained permission to fish at Beech Mountain Lakes, a private community near Hazleton, Pennsylvania, which is about 30 minutes away from my home in Mahanoy Plane, PA. Beech Mountain Lakes is in Drums, just outside of Hazleton, and to enter the community one must pass a guarded security gate. I agreed to go fishing, and Nigel later picked me up in his pick-up truck.
When we got to Hazleton, we stopped at a Wal-Mart Supercenter for some bait and other fishing necessities. It was the first time I ever went in a Wal-Mart store. From there, we headed to Beech Mountain Lakes. When we arrived – it was dusk, after 6 p.m. – Nigel spoke to the security guard, who then waved us in. We did not head to the community’s main lake. Instead, we traveled in Nigel’s truck down a winding dirt road through woods to a smaller, pond-like water body. Nigel wanted to fish the pond because he had a hunch it was black with fish ripe for the plucking. It was an out-of-the-way place. The pond rested quietly in front of us, and to our backs there was a wide field with tall grass. On the perimeter of the field were woods.
Nigel’s hunch about the pond being loaded with fish turned out to be wrong. We fished for hours and neither of us had a bite. During the course of our many discussions that evening, we witnessed the day transform into night, but we continued fishing, determined to make the excursion a success. Our sighting was unexpected. It came out of nowhere and effectively ended our fishing trip.
It was sometime after 10 p.m. when I turned around to get a cigarette from my tackle box and I saw three large bright lights shining through some trees at the perimeter of the grassy field. I said, "Nigel, what the hell is that?" Nigel turned around and looked in the direction of the lights, which were hovering very low to the ground, facing in our direction and slowly moving from behind the trees and heading toward us.
"I don’t know," Nigel said, astonishment in his voice. I felt a cold fear rush through my body as the lights continued to move toward us. The lights were huge, like car headlights in high-beam mode except these were much, much larger. The lights were affixed to a singular object and spaced out in a horizontal row. The scariest aspect of the object is that it made no sound whatsoever. The object continued to move toward us and stopped when it was almost directly above our heads. It was only two or three stories off the ground.
I was extremely frightened by this point and thought the thing was about to land in the field with high grass. "Let’s go, Nigel, let’s go now," I said with a trembling voice. Nigel shined his flashlight at the object in an apparent attempt to make out its shape; because it was dark and the three lights were facing in our direction, it was difficult ascertain the object’s shape. "What is it?" Nigel said as he continued shining the flashlight. The object then began moving away from us toward the woods, but in a different direction than from where it came. Nigel and I hurriedly began throwing our fishing equipment in the back of his truck as the object continued moving away from us but hovering what seemed dangerously close to the treetops. Nigel started the truck and speedily drove along the winding dirt road that we came in on, but then had to slam on the brakes to allow about 20 deer – running away from the direction of where the object had flown – to cross our path.
We didn’t talk as we drove. Nigel stopped at a donut shop, and we both exited his truck and entered the shop still not speaking. We were in shock. After we each ordered coffees, we sat at a table. After a few minutes, I broke the silence. "That was a UFO, Nigel," I said.
"I’m not saying anything about it," Nigel said, his immediate reaction being the ridicule we could both endure if we made our sighting public.
"But did you see that thing? It had to be a UFO. There was no sound! Did you see the way it moved?" I said.
"I know, I know," Nigel said. "I can’t believe it!"
For years after the sighting, I related the story to some family members and friends, and as Nigel feared, they had trouble believing it was something otherworldly. I didn’t make the sighting public until 2002 when I wrote a commentary about the extraterrestrial reality for The Hawk Eye, a newspaper in Burlington, Iowa, that I was employed at as a reporter. I moved to Iowa in 2001 and worked there until 2007. After that, I took a job in Hawaii and stayed there until April 2009, and then returned to Pennsylvania. Soon after my return, I showed Nigel a copy of the 2002 commentary and after he finished reading it, he said, "That’s exactly how it happened."
I reached the conclusion that the object was extraterrestrial because it simply could not have been something manufactured by mankind. The object was as wide as a tractortrailer is long. It sported three gigantic lights and moved through the sky without making a peep of a sound. It moved in a fashion unlike any manmade flying craft I’m aware of and was seemingly capable of changing direction at will and with no problem. If it were a manmade flying machine, why in the world would it be floating around a forest surrounding a private community near Hazleton? The year of the sighting was 1994 and over 15 years later I still have never seen a flying machine made by man capable of the types of maneuvers that this thing was capable of making. I’ve also never seen or heard of a manmade flying machine that could move about the sky without making a sound.
It had to be something made by an intelligence that is greater than man’s intelligence. Man is not yet capable of manufacturing the sort of machine I saw hovering over my head in 1994. People who have doubts about an extraterrestrial reality would have no doubts if they saw what I saw. It was real and I saw it and my friend saw it. The sighting nudged me into knower status. I know there are extraterrestrials visiting this planet because I saw one of their flying machines in action. The government can continue to pretend that there is nothing to the extraterrestrial reality, but there are some people out there who know unequivocally the government is lying about what it knows on this subject.
Every person travels his or her own individual path through life that helps to establish his or her identity, and that identity in turn is expressed to the world through that person’s career, family, lifestyle, ideas and beliefs.
Life is not easy for anybody. Every person – regardless if they’re rich or poor, married or single, healthy or sick – faces personal issues on a regular basis that spark emotions ranging from pain and suffering to pleasure and happiness. Everybody is different yet they are all the same.
The beliefs that are formed in the mind of an individual can occur in a variety of ways. A person, for instance, could be conditioned as a child to harbor certain religious beliefs that are maintained by that person for the rest of his or her life.
Sometimes, however, a person develops a strong belief in something through experiences without the aid of conditioning. That is what happened to me with my belief in the extraterrestrial reality. Things happened at different points of my life that eventually established in my mind the knowledge that highly intelligent extraterrestrial beings are among us. If it were not for certain life events, I could have easily turned out to be a skeptic of the UFO/extraterrestrial phenomenon.
Regarding UFO/extraterrestrial belief patterns, a person can fall in to one of several categories:
| • | Skeptic. This is a person who simply cannot accept the notion that extraterrestrial beings are coming to Earth. This belief is usually attained through conditioning. |
| • | False skeptic. This is a person who may or may not believe extraterrestrials are among us, but is being paid to advance propaganda that attempts to debunk the extraterrestrial reality. |
| • | Believer. This person is very open-minded to the "possibility" extraterrestrials are here, but still requires "official" word that extraterrestrials are among us before he or she can believe in the reality 100 percent. |
| • | Knower. This is a person who is 100 percent certain that Earth is being visited by extraterrestrials. Some alien abductees, some people who have seen extraterrestrial spacecraft and/or extraterrestrial creatures up close and personal, some UFO investigators and some federal government officials fall into this category. |
I am a knower. I know extraterrestrial beings are here.
I was raised a Catholic in a small former coal mining village called Mahanoy Plane in northeastern Pennsylvania. The population of this small spot in the world in the 1970s when I was growing up was the same then as it is now, only a few hundred people. In 1976 I became an alter boy shortly after receiving my first communion, and I remained an alter boy for the next 10 years until I graduated from high school in 1986.
As a Catholic, I was taught as a child that bad people when they die go to Hell, the domain of the Devil. Although the notion of Hell and the Devil frightened me greatly as a child, I never feared ending up in Hell because I led a good life. I strived to be good.
Every young boy has nightmares sometimes, and I was no different. All sorts of monsters would visit my dreams during my childhood and cause me to wake up in terror. I was perplexed on occasion when I would wake up in the middle of the night and discover that I was unable to move. It would take a few minutes to snap out of this strange spell that caused my body to feel paralyzed but my brain to be wide awake – and in utter terror of my dilemma. Years later, I found out that what I was enduring during those horrifying moments was a phenomena called sleep paralysis. The mind has a built-in mechanism that paralyzes the body so a person doesn’t act out his or her dreams. Sometimes those mental wires don’t work properly and can cause a person to either sleep walk or put them in the state of sleep paralysis. I suffered from the latter malady several times.
I apparently suffered from sleep walking on occasion during the same time period in the mid- to late 1970s when I was seven-, eight-, and nine-years-old, only on those occasions I have no recollection of the incidents. My mother reported several times during my childhood that I had traipsed downstairs at nighttime to the living room where she and my father were watching television and scream-cried in terror of "monsters" in my bedroom. On these occasions, she said I would rush downstairs in hysterics, cry in terror about monsters and then return to my bedroom as if nothing had happened. Even as a child I had a fascination with these reports from mom because I never had any recollection whatsoever of the possible nightmares that caused me to make such a spectacle of myself in the middle of the night. Today I wonder whether these events were the result of simple nightmares or something even more terrifying and more real, but I will not venture to speculate further on that.
However, there is one strange thing that happened during my childhood that I know was not a dream, nightmare or a sleep paralysis episode. We lived in a tiny row home, and I shared the attic with my brother Dave, who is a year younger than me. The room was split with an open staircase, and Dave slept on one side of the room and I the other. There was a wall light at the top of the stairs that we usually kept on at night, and it happened to be turned on the night when something unearthly dropped in for a visit.
I was about eight or nine at the time when I woke up in the middle of the night to a loud, almost deafening electronic humming sound. Not unusual was that my thin blue blanket was covering my head, which is something I regularly did when I went to bed. Highly unusual – in addition to the humming sound – was that I could clearly see the shadow of a three-fingered claw-like hand moving up and down above my head. I was terrified. To my young mind, it was the Devil. I could conjure up no other explanation. "Who’s there?" I managed a couple of times, but the non-human hand just continued to get closer to my head and then farther away. It was like it was performing some odd religious rite. I could not gather up the courage to remove the blanket that was over my head to face whatever was attached to that claw, but I did peak out of it slightly in my brother’s direction. Dave appeared sound asleep. I started to yell his name. Dave did not budge, but that could have been due to the electronic humming sound, which I immediately realized was muffling my voice. My terror grew greater and I started to scream for my parents. Nobody came. I turned my focus back to the claw-like hand and tried to communicate with it again, but it just continued to move up and down, with thick outstretched fingers that came to points at the tips, above my head. I closed my eyes and started to pray. Every now and then I would open my eyes to see whether the hand was still there.
It was still there and I should have known it was still there because the humming sound was constant. I prayed and prayed and prayed.
The next thing I knew, it was bright outside and morning. But it wasn’t like I had a nightmare and woke up. It was like time had passed between the moment I was praying and the time I woke up. It wasn’t like waking from a nightmare at the breaking day. Something had happened late the night before, I passed out somehow, hours went by and then I awoke. The entire event lasted about 20 minutes and I was wide-awake the whole time. There was no doubt. It was not a dream.
Of course, when I told my mother about it in the morning, she did not believe it was real. I argued with her for about 30 minutes but she insisted that I only had a dream. It crossed my mind at the time that, "I’m only a kid and nobody is going to believe me." As the years went by, I sometimes told the story to friends and family members and many times the response was the same as my mother’s: "It must have been a dream."
For well over 10 years after the event, the only explanation I could muster was that the thing in my room was something satanic. I’ve always known that something was in my room that night and that it could not have been a dream. It was not until the late 1980s or early 1990s that my opinion about the event started to change.
The first time I had any knowledge that some people believed extraterrestrial beings were coming to Earth was in the late 1970s or early 1980s. I had watched science fiction films growing up such as "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers" and "War of the Worlds," and I even went to see "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" in a movie theater sometime in 1978. But I never seriously entertained the possibility that beings from other worlds were actually coming here during the first 10 or 11 years of my life. In either 1979 or 1980, my father was watching an episode of the TV series, "In Search Of …," a documentary that was hosted by Leonard Nimoy. The episode speculated on the possibility that beings from other worlds were coming to Earth in flying saucers. It was the first time I had ever been presented with information that extraterrestrials could actually be real. I was fascinated, but I didn’t really know what I thought about it until years later.
After watching shows on television in the late 1980s or early 1990s about people who claimed to be abducted by aliens, a bell started to sound off in my head. The night of the claw finally started to make sense, right down to the electronic humming sound. It wasn’t Lucifer who appeared in my bedroom that night, it was an alien!
Even though I embraced this new concept, I still had some doubt about an extraterrestrial reality. It was simply too fantastic. Besides, I would never be able to prove conclusively to anybody that an alien had indeed infiltrated my childhood sleeping quarters back in the 1970s to lull me into some weird shock because I was the only one awake to experience the event. I knew something very odd had happened, I knew for a fact there was something in my room that night no matter what anybody else said, and I knew that there was no way, no how that the event was a dream. I still know it and I’ll always know it. I also believe there’s a strong possibility that something more happened that night but that I have no conscious memory of it. I know for sure that when I was praying to God to save me that night, I was far from sleepy. I was frightened beyond belief and not at all feeling like a little shuteye.
The event that pushed me into the full "knower" category, however, did not occur until August 1994. This time I would walk away from a particular experience "knowing" with an absolute certainty that extraterrestrials are here. Ladies and gentlemen, when you see a huge flying machine that makes no sound whatsoever approach you in the black of night and hover a mere two or three stories above your head, you suddenly "know" the truth.
It’s funny how when a major event occurs in one’s life, that person can remember other details that surround the incident which otherwise would have been forgotten.
It was a warm August day in 1994 when a long-time friend, "Nigel," called me up and asked if I’d be interested in going fishing. I feel somewhat compelled to use an alias for my friend because he’s a college professor and it is unclear what the reaction would be of his peers if it was discovered that he at one time saw an Unidentified Flying Object that he believes may have had an extraterrestrial origin. I talked to Nigel recently about our sighting, but I didn’t bother asking him if he’d mind whether his real name appeared in this article. I would not want to jeopardize his credibility in any way. When it comes to the UFO/extraterrestrial problem, however, the simple fact is there are many out there who still view those who had a direct experience with otherworldly visitors and/or their craft as "nuts."
When Nigel called me in 1994, he told me that, through a family member, he obtained permission to fish at Beech Mountain Lakes, a private community near Hazleton, Pennsylvania, which is about 30 minutes away from my home in Mahanoy Plane, PA. Beech Mountain Lakes is in Drums, just outside of Hazleton, and to enter the community one must pass a guarded security gate. I agreed to go fishing, and Nigel later picked me up in his pick-up truck.
When we got to Hazleton, we stopped at a Wal-Mart Supercenter for some bait and other fishing necessities. It was the first time I ever went in a Wal-Mart store. From there, we headed to Beech Mountain Lakes. When we arrived – it was dusk, after 6 p.m. – Nigel spoke to the security guard, who then waved us in. We did not head to the community’s main lake. Instead, we traveled in Nigel’s truck down a winding dirt road through woods to a smaller, pond-like water body. Nigel wanted to fish the pond because he had a hunch it was black with fish ripe for the plucking. It was an out-of-the-way place. The pond rested quietly in front of us, and to our backs there was a wide field with tall grass. On the perimeter of the field were woods.
Nigel’s hunch about the pond being loaded with fish turned out to be wrong. We fished for hours and neither of us had a bite. During the course of our many discussions that evening, we witnessed the day transform into night, but we continued fishing, determined to make the excursion a success. Our sighting was unexpected. It came out of nowhere and effectively ended our fishing trip.
It was sometime after 10 p.m. when I turned around to get a cigarette from my tackle box and I saw three large bright lights shining through some trees at the perimeter of the grassy field. I said, "Nigel, what the hell is that?" Nigel turned around and looked in the direction of the lights, which were hovering very low to the ground, facing in our direction and slowly moving from behind the trees and heading toward us.
"I don’t know," Nigel said, astonishment in his voice. I felt a cold fear rush through my body as the lights continued to move toward us. The lights were huge, like car headlights in high-beam mode except these were much, much larger. The lights were affixed to a singular object and spaced out in a horizontal row. The scariest aspect of the object is that it made no sound whatsoever. The object continued to move toward us and stopped when it was almost directly above our heads. It was only two or three stories off the ground.
I was extremely frightened by this point and thought the thing was about to land in the field with high grass. "Let’s go, Nigel, let’s go now," I said with a trembling voice. Nigel shined his flashlight at the object in an apparent attempt to make out its shape; because it was dark and the three lights were facing in our direction, it was difficult ascertain the object’s shape. "What is it?" Nigel said as he continued shining the flashlight. The object then began moving away from us toward the woods, but in a different direction than from where it came. Nigel and I hurriedly began throwing our fishing equipment in the back of his truck as the object continued moving away from us but hovering what seemed dangerously close to the treetops. Nigel started the truck and speedily drove along the winding dirt road that we came in on, but then had to slam on the brakes to allow about 20 deer – running away from the direction of where the object had flown – to cross our path.
We didn’t talk as we drove. Nigel stopped at a donut shop, and we both exited his truck and entered the shop still not speaking. We were in shock. After we each ordered coffees, we sat at a table. After a few minutes, I broke the silence. "That was a UFO, Nigel," I said.
"I’m not saying anything about it," Nigel said, his immediate reaction being the ridicule we could both endure if we made our sighting public.
"But did you see that thing? It had to be a UFO. There was no sound! Did you see the way it moved?" I said.
"I know, I know," Nigel said. "I can’t believe it!"
For years after the sighting, I related the story to some family members and friends, and as Nigel feared, they had trouble believing it was something otherworldly. I didn’t make the sighting public until 2002 when I wrote a commentary about the extraterrestrial reality for The Hawk Eye, a newspaper in Burlington, Iowa, that I was employed at as a reporter. I moved to Iowa in 2001 and worked there until 2007. After that, I took a job in Hawaii and stayed there until April 2009, and then returned to Pennsylvania. Soon after my return, I showed Nigel a copy of the 2002 commentary and after he finished reading it, he said, "That’s exactly how it happened."
I reached the conclusion that the object was extraterrestrial because it simply could not have been something manufactured by mankind. The object was as wide as a tractortrailer is long. It sported three gigantic lights and moved through the sky without making a peep of a sound. It moved in a fashion unlike any manmade flying craft I’m aware of and was seemingly capable of changing direction at will and with no problem. If it were a manmade flying machine, why in the world would it be floating around a forest surrounding a private community near Hazleton? The year of the sighting was 1994 and over 15 years later I still have never seen a flying machine made by man capable of the types of maneuvers that this thing was capable of making. I’ve also never seen or heard of a manmade flying machine that could move about the sky without making a sound.
It had to be something made by an intelligence that is greater than man’s intelligence. Man is not yet capable of manufacturing the sort of machine I saw hovering over my head in 1994. People who have doubts about an extraterrestrial reality would have no doubts if they saw what I saw. It was real and I saw it and my friend saw it. The sighting nudged me into knower status. I know there are extraterrestrials visiting this planet because I saw one of their flying machines in action. The government can continue to pretend that there is nothing to the extraterrestrial reality, but there are some people out there who know unequivocally the government is lying about what it knows on this subject.
Scariest Movie Music
Many times we tend to overlook the musical soundtracks that accompany the movies we go to see. When we comment on the movies, we usually mention nothing about the music. But there are some exceptions. For example, who could ever forget John Williams' pounding score for the 1975 box office blockbuster, "Jaws?" Or Bernard Herrmann's screeching all-string soundtrack for Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 shock classic, "Psycho?"
Usually, the music composed for fright films is the most memorable. But what is the scariest movie music ever composed? With Halloween around the corner, now is a perfect time to broach the subject. My choice has to be Jerry Goldsmith's haunting score for the 1976 chiller, "The Omen." This is the type of soundtrack that can give you nightmares.
Usually, the music composed for fright films is the most memorable. But what is the scariest movie music ever composed? With Halloween around the corner, now is a perfect time to broach the subject. My choice has to be Jerry Goldsmith's haunting score for the 1976 chiller, "The Omen." This is the type of soundtrack that can give you nightmares.
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Scary faces on film.
The photos below depict perhaps two of the most horrifying faces to ever grace the big screen. The first one is the face of Satan that flashed briefly on the screen during the 1973 horror classic, "The Exorcist." The second one is of the horrifying witch that came back from the dead for revenge in the 1963 cult classic "Black Sabbath." I remember watching "Black Sabbath" on WPIX Channel 11's "Chiller Theater" on a Saturday night when I was a kid back in the 1970s. Needless to say, every time I closed my eyes that night to try and fall asleep, I saw that horrible face. With that in mind, I wouldn't stare at these two faces for too long. They might give you nightmares.
By the way, speaking of Chiller Theater, if you would like to refresh your memory on the scary opening titles used for that program, the youtube link is below for your viewing pleasure.
Robert Osborne returning to TCM Dec. 1!
Robert Osborne, the excellent host for commercial-free cable network Turner Classic Movies, is scheduled to return to work on December 1.
Osborne, 79, has been the on-air host for TCM since 1994, but has been out of action since the early summer. It was announced in July that he was taking a short vacation for minor surgery. However, many fans of Osborne became concerned when the host's vacation seemed to last a little longer than expected. Guest hosts such as Peter Travers, the movie critic for Rolling Stone Magazine, and actress Winona Ryder, have been filling in for Osborne.
However, a smiling Osborne began appearing in short blurbs on TCM recently to let viewers know he'll be returning Dec. 1.
TCM is considered by many television buffs as one of the best cable channels available. It broadcasts classic, uncut, commercial-free movies 24 hours per day. The network is now available in high definition, but many cable companies, as well as satellite giant Directv, have failed to offer the HD version yet in their lineups. Osborne regularly introduces films shown during primetime hours, as well as provides additional tidbits about the features when they end.
Osborne, 79, has been the on-air host for TCM since 1994, but has been out of action since the early summer. It was announced in July that he was taking a short vacation for minor surgery. However, many fans of Osborne became concerned when the host's vacation seemed to last a little longer than expected. Guest hosts such as Peter Travers, the movie critic for Rolling Stone Magazine, and actress Winona Ryder, have been filling in for Osborne.
However, a smiling Osborne began appearing in short blurbs on TCM recently to let viewers know he'll be returning Dec. 1.
TCM is considered by many television buffs as one of the best cable channels available. It broadcasts classic, uncut, commercial-free movies 24 hours per day. The network is now available in high definition, but many cable companies, as well as satellite giant Directv, have failed to offer the HD version yet in their lineups. Osborne regularly introduces films shown during primetime hours, as well as provides additional tidbits about the features when they end.
Imagine Hitler's head in a robot!
The primary villain in my new science fiction fantasy adventure novel, THE NINTH LEG, is none other than notorious historical mass murderer Adolf Hitler. Unfortunately for Don Black, the book's protagonist, he has to help a race of aliens defeat and destroy Hitler and his army of extraterrestrial Nazis. Making that task next to impossible to accomplish is the chilling reality that Hitler's head is being kept alive inside an indestructible robot body. The fantastic chain of events that sends Don Black and his nemesis into their incredible positions is detailed throughout the novel. However, below is an excerpt from the part in the novel when Don first sees Hitler, whose holographic image appears in the sky on the alien world where Don is trapped.
Excerpt from THE NINTH LEG
Copyright 2011 James Quirk
The humanoid thing depicted in the hologram was clearly a sort of robot. It was silver in color and had bulky robotic legs, thick rectangular feet, long robotic arms that had pincers instead of hands, and a large robotic trunk that was covered with small blinking lights. The whole thing appeared anthropomorphic in construction except for one detail - it had a real human head. The head was housed completely inside a block-shaped, silver-colored helmet, and a face could clearly be seen behind a square glass window on the front of the helmet. Even if the center of the robot’s chest did not sport the obvious Nazi swastika, Don Black would still have known that the face beneath the robot helmet was supposed to belong to – or perhaps actually belong to - Adolf Hitler. The black hair parted neatly to one side, the little mustache, the piercing eyes … all of the characteristics of Adolf Hitler’s face were embodied beneath the helmets of the robot holographs looking down from the sky. There was no mistake about it - the robot had Hitler’s face. The voice coming from the robot holograph that was entering Don’s mind telepathically even sounded like the voice of Adolf Hitler that Don had heard many times before while watching televised documentaries about the man and Nazi Germany. The only difference was that this Hitler was speaking English. The lips of the Hitler automaton were moving as words entered Don’s mind, but the mouth movements were not corresponding to the words. It reminded Don of watching a foreign language film dubbed in English. Don remembered the words Mariumba had shared with him when they first met. Intelligent communication between minds requires no language. Regardless, Don Black could not make himself believe that the face staring down from the sky belonged to the actual Adolf Hitler.
Hitler committed suicide in 1945. I was kidnapped by the Greys in the summer of 2011. This can’t be the real Hitler. If it’s not the real Hitler, then what is it? Have I gone completely mad?
The Hitler thing finished delivering loudly and clearly its repetitive message and started delivering the same, obviously scripted message again, loudly and clearly, from the beginning.
“I am the supreme leader of the Nordic Aryan Reich. We have assumed control of your planet. We are in charge now. Your power sources have been destroyed and the beasts of Arachnia are no longer under your control. Your elders are advised to surrender immediately. If your leaders choose not to surrender within the next three days, we will release a poison gas into the atmosphere that will kill every living thing on the planet. I repeat …”
"Psycho" awesome on Blu-ray!
Within the past year, I purchased one of my favorite classic movies, "Psycho," on Blu-ray. Back in the 1980s, I bought the VHS version of the film. In the late 1990s, I bought it on DVD. Now, the Blu-ray. If you have this movie in any format, it's a good one to break out during the weeks leading up to Halloween. I recently showed it to my son and nephew and it was great because they knew nothing about it. It was special to witness their surprise at some of the shocking sequences, especially the conclusion. Below is a review I recently wrote on Amazon:
Alfred Hitchcock's horror classic has never looked better than on this spectacular Blu-ray release from Universal. It looks like it could have been made yesterday. I owned this originally on VHS tape and then DVD, and this version is leaps and bounds ahead of those previous home video releases in terms of quality. The black-and-white image on the Blu-ray is solid, and the 5.1 Dolby surround sound enhances greatly the musical score and sound effects. For purists, the original mono soundtrack is included.
You can't go wrong with "Psycho." It was fun showing it to some of the younger ones in my family who knew nothing about it. Now, if Universal could get around to finally releasing Hitchcock's "The Birds" on Blu-ray (it's been available for pre-order now for over a year), things would be great. Also looking forward to Blu-ray releases of "Vertigo" and "Rear Window." Come to think of it, I'm looking forward to Blu-ray releases of all Hitchcock's classics. Would love to get my hands on a 3D Blu-ray of "Dial M for Murder." And some of the older ones like "Rebecca," "Lifeboat," and "Notorious" would be nice, too.
Alfred Hitchcock's horror classic has never looked better than on this spectacular Blu-ray release from Universal. It looks like it could have been made yesterday. I owned this originally on VHS tape and then DVD, and this version is leaps and bounds ahead of those previous home video releases in terms of quality. The black-and-white image on the Blu-ray is solid, and the 5.1 Dolby surround sound enhances greatly the musical score and sound effects. For purists, the original mono soundtrack is included.
You can't go wrong with "Psycho." It was fun showing it to some of the younger ones in my family who knew nothing about it. Now, if Universal could get around to finally releasing Hitchcock's "The Birds" on Blu-ray (it's been available for pre-order now for over a year), things would be great. Also looking forward to Blu-ray releases of "Vertigo" and "Rear Window." Come to think of it, I'm looking forward to Blu-ray releases of all Hitchcock's classics. Would love to get my hands on a 3D Blu-ray of "Dial M for Murder." And some of the older ones like "Rebecca," "Lifeboat," and "Notorious" would be nice, too.
Reviews for THE NINTH LEG!
Since publishing THE NINTH LEG in August, the book has received three reviews from Amazon customers, and all have been favorable. Below are excerpts from the reviews.
"This is an excellent story and I recommend it very highly. If you enjoy watching Alien Autopsy or the many conspiracy programs on TV, this book is for you. If you've been reading the covers of the tabloids for years and want a way to fit them all together, Mr. Quirk has done this for you. Check it out!"
"The Ninth Leg is an excellent first effort from James Quirk. The story has a truly unique plot as it melds together elements of sci-fi, classic monster movies, and historical fiction. ... The Ninth Leg is a good read and would not be out of place on bookshelves next to the sci-fi greats, no small feat for an independently published book. ... All the classic sci-fi elements are there - time travel, futuristic barbarian sport, strange alien races - and are set to a fast-paced adventure that wouldn't be out of place on the big screen."
"This book certainly has its moments. It is very well written and thought out. What I really liked about this novel is that it brings new material and ideas to the forefront."
If you're interested in reading the reviews in full, here is the link to the Amazon page for THE NINTH LEG:
"This is an excellent story and I recommend it very highly. If you enjoy watching Alien Autopsy or the many conspiracy programs on TV, this book is for you. If you've been reading the covers of the tabloids for years and want a way to fit them all together, Mr. Quirk has done this for you. Check it out!"
"The Ninth Leg is an excellent first effort from James Quirk. The story has a truly unique plot as it melds together elements of sci-fi, classic monster movies, and historical fiction. ... The Ninth Leg is a good read and would not be out of place on bookshelves next to the sci-fi greats, no small feat for an independently published book. ... All the classic sci-fi elements are there - time travel, futuristic barbarian sport, strange alien races - and are set to a fast-paced adventure that wouldn't be out of place on the big screen."
"This book certainly has its moments. It is very well written and thought out. What I really liked about this novel is that it brings new material and ideas to the forefront."
If you're interested in reading the reviews in full, here is the link to the Amazon page for THE NINTH LEG:
Scariest Book Ever!
My vote goes to "The Amityville Horror," by Jay Anson. Sure, I've read just about every single scary novel that Stephen King put out there, and yeah, they were scary as hell. But I always knew reading a King novel that all the things contained within them were merely figments of King's brilliant imagination.
Anson's book, however, is allegedly based on fact. It was during my pre-teenage life in the early 1980s when I decided to read "The Amityville Horror," which was based on the alleged true-life experience of the Lutz family in a haunted house in Long Island, New York. The end of every chapter featured a horrifying cliffhanger that made it difficult to sleep at night. The story took place over a 28-day period from December 1975 through January 1976 - when the Lutz family abandoned the house after enduring a month's worth of ghostly encounters. Forget the movies that attempted to map out the terror experienced by the Lutz family. Read the book instead. It will scare the hell out of you!
Anson's book, however, is allegedly based on fact. It was during my pre-teenage life in the early 1980s when I decided to read "The Amityville Horror," which was based on the alleged true-life experience of the Lutz family in a haunted house in Long Island, New York. The end of every chapter featured a horrifying cliffhanger that made it difficult to sleep at night. The story took place over a 28-day period from December 1975 through January 1976 - when the Lutz family abandoned the house after enduring a month's worth of ghostly encounters. Forget the movies that attempted to map out the terror experienced by the Lutz family. Read the book instead. It will scare the hell out of you!
Scariest Movie of All-time!
George A. Romero's 1968 black-and-white low-budget shocker "Night of the Living Dead" is the scariest film ever made. There's something about being trapped in a lonely farmhouse while dozens of living dead cannibals are outside trying to bust inside so they can eat you alive that always gets me. There are lots of film critics and analysts who love to drum up the political sub-texts of the film all the time (that it was a commentary on the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War, etc.) but I never bought any of that. The only thing I ever thought about when watching this movie is just how horrible it would be if the world was suddenly infested with a horde of living-dead zombies bent on the complete annhilation of the living.
No zombie film was ever as terrifying. In fact, no movie in the history of time was ever as terrifying as this masterpiece.
No zombie film was ever as terrifying. In fact, no movie in the history of time was ever as terrifying as this masterpiece.
Weird Stories
I love (and hate) frightening thoughts. Sometimes when I'm alone I ponder all sorts of strange concepts in an effort to make me appreciate how good my actual life really is. I imagine worst-case scenarios that I would never want to play a part in. One day it occurred to me that I should share some of these awful imagined predicaments with everybody else. I mean, what is the point in keeping them to myself? The result is my first published short story collection, WEIRD STORIES VOLUME ONE. It was recently published on Amazon for Kindle just in time for Halloween.
Here's the description for the collection:
Take a trip into macabre and bizarre dark worlds with WEIRD STORIES VOLUME ONE. Three short stories sure to boggle your mind, curdle your blood and raise goose pimples on your flesh are included.
In WISHFUL THINKERS, a brain transplantation experiment takes a dark twist into terror. In DELAYED EXISTENCE, a super villain employs a sinister method to prevent any super heroes from attempting to thwart his criminal escapades. Finally, in HELL HOLE, the soul of an evil man in Satan's domain attempts to bust out with the help of a mysterious stranger.
And here's a link to it: http://www.amazon.com/Weird-Stories-Volume-One-ebook/dp/B005QAO32U/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1318920434&sr=1-1
Here's the description for the collection:
Take a trip into macabre and bizarre dark worlds with WEIRD STORIES VOLUME ONE. Three short stories sure to boggle your mind, curdle your blood and raise goose pimples on your flesh are included.
In WISHFUL THINKERS, a brain transplantation experiment takes a dark twist into terror. In DELAYED EXISTENCE, a super villain employs a sinister method to prevent any super heroes from attempting to thwart his criminal escapades. Finally, in HELL HOLE, the soul of an evil man in Satan's domain attempts to bust out with the help of a mysterious stranger.
And here's a link to it: http://www.amazon.com/Weird-Stories-Volume-One-ebook/dp/B005QAO32U/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1318920434&sr=1-1
TCM's month of horror!
Turner Classic Movies this October is televising a slew of classic horror flicks. Right now "Curse of the Demon," a.k.a "Night of the Demon," is playing. This is a great horror film from 1957 starring Dana Andrews, Peggy Cummins and the great Niall MacGinnis. If you're reading this post, that means you are either missing this movie or have missed it altogether. Regardless, keep it in mind the next time you spot it in the TV listings. When I was a kid, this one scared the bejesus out of me. Imagine a witch's curse that sends a demon straight out of Hell after an intended victim! That's what this one is about. When I watched "Drag Me to Hell" a couple of years ago, I knew instantly where the filmmakers got the idea for it - from "Curse of the Demon."
Is there something worse than alien abduction?
One of the most terrifying possibilities involving alleged real extraterrestrials is that some are mutilating humans to death. Just like cattle mutilations that are apparently caused by aliens, some investigators allege that humans sometimes fall victim to these heinous acts. One of the plotlines in my new science fiction fantasy adventure ebook for Kindle, THE NINTH LEG, centers on human mutilation by aliens. Not only does this allegedly real phenomenon play an integral part in the novel, the reason why it might occur is explained in the book's most horrifying sequence.
Below is a link to the page on Amazon where you can find my book. However, before you click it, please take the time to read an article below the link that I published in 2009 about human mutilation by aliens.
Are aliens mutilating humans?
If you see a UFO, run. That was the simple message delivered by Butch Witkowski, the Mutual UFO Network’s top investigator in Pennsylvania, during the PA MUFON conference in 2009. Witkowski spoke during the conference about one aspect of the extraterrestrial reality that is rarely discussed by UFO researchers – human mutilation. The UFO problem initially came to the atention of the public in 1947 when numerous sightings of flying saucers were reported. In the 1950s, reports of landed saucers and humanoid beings surfaced. In the 1960s, the abduction facet of the UFO issue was brought to light by the Betty and Barney Hill case. In the late 1960s through the 1970s, cattle mutilations were introduced into the fold of the UFO problem as another issue apparently brought about by alien visitors. Conspiracy theories regarding the government’s apparent cover-up of the extraterrestrial/UFO reality were all the rage throughout the 1980s and 1990s as stories about the Roswell Incident and Area 51 found their way to the public domain.
At the dawn of the new century, it started to become apparent to some researchers – most notably Dr. David M. Jacobs – that the aliens were conducting a human hybridization program that involved mixing human DNA with extraterrestrial DNA in an effort to populate the planet with a new species. The purpose of this, as Jacobs pointed out in his 1999 book, “The Threat,” is to take complete control of the planet at some point. One of the biggest issues surely to be a hot topic among UFO researchers during the new decade will certainly be the mutilation of humans by aliens.
Although human mutilation stories have been featured in articles on some Internet websites, they have rarely been mentioned in books written by UFO researchers. As the decade progresses, that is sure to change, and world governments at some point will be compelled to address the problem. Like cattle mutilation cases, humans who are allegedly mutilated by aliens are usually found completely drained of blood. Other characteristics can include the apparent surgical removal of eyeballs, ears, reproductive organs, jaws, and tongues. Victims’ anuses are also sometimes cored out.
As part of his presentation on human mutilation, Witkowski – a retired police homicide investigator with 27 years experience – reported he is investigating the mysterious death of Northumberland County, Pennsylvania resident Todd Sees in 2002. Peter Davenport, director of the National UFO Reporting Center, initially reported the story that Sees might have been mutilated and killed by extraterrestrials in August 2002. At about 5 a.m. Aug. 4, 2002, Sees, 39, told his wife he was going to spot early season deer near their home and that he would return at noon. Sees, however, did not return at noon, and authorities were later contacted and a massive search ensued, according to Davenport. Tracking dogs were used in the effort to find Sees but could never find his scent. The only thing investigators found was Sees' all terrain vehicle, which Sees had apparently driven along a power line road near his home to the top of Montour Ridge, and one of Sees’ shoes at the top of a tree, according to Davenport. Two days into the search – which involved up to 100 volunteer searchers – Sees’ body was discovered in some heavy brush very near his home, Davenport said. Authorities would not allow Sees’ family to see the body and also recommended that they have a closed-casket viewing, according to information compiled by Davenport.
Point Township Police, which handled the case, apparently contacted the FBI at some point during the investigation, but the reason for that is unclear, Witkowski said. Davenport said in a recent interview that, in the same month Sees’ body was discovered, anonymous sources contacted NUFORC with information on the matter. According to information from the anonymous sources, some farmers had sighted a UFO hovering over the top of Montour Ridge where Sees is believed to have driven to on his ATV. Later in 2002, Northumberland County Coroner James Kelley sent out a press release that indicated Sees died from “cocaine toxicity.” Davenport, however, had received information earlier that indicated Sees may have been mutilated. Another strange aspect of the case that Davenport learned from one of his anonymous sources was that military helicopters were seen scouring the area where Sees disappeared days after the body was found. Davenport said he alerted MUFON in 2002 about the incident because he felt it warranted further investigation. Although he was glad to learn MUFON is finally investigating the case, he said it might have been easier if it was launched earlier.
Witkowski promised during his presentation that he would find out what happened to Sees. Witkowski said he recently spoke to a Point Township police sergeant who threatened to arrest the MUFON investigator for asking questions about the matter. Witkowski said he asked the sergeant why it was reported in 2002 that Sees died from a cocaine overdose when the case is still considered open by police. He also reported that another MUFON investigator is looking into another possible mutilation case that occurred recently in Colorado. Regarding the Todd Sees case, Witkowski said Sees’ family was at first totally against MUFON investigating the matter, but is now “100 percent” behind the effort to get answers.
Witkowski also offered some words of wisdom. “If you see one (UFO), run,” he said. “Take your picture. Run. Take a mental picture. Run. … You need to run.”
Alien Horror!
Thank you for taking the time out to read about my new science fiction fantasy adventure novel, THE NINTH LEG.
It's about the terrifying exploits of Don Black, a loving husband who is kidnapped by aliens intent on using him for scientific experimentation on their home planet. The journey to the extraterrestrial world, however, takes an unexpected detour when the alien spacecraft carrying Don crashes on a planet teeming with carnivorous monsters and ruled by gigantic, telepathic spiders. Making matters worse, another race of aliens led by a time-snatched Adolf Hitler arrives with plans to assume control of the planet and use its unlimited resources to conquer the galaxy. Can Don help prevent Hitler and his army of space Nazis from causing another Holocaust, this time one on a galactic scale that targets all intelligent life forms?
Below is a link to the Amazon page for THE NINTH LEG.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Ninth-Leg-ebook/dp/B005HJMQ4C/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1318915625&sr=1-1
It's about the terrifying exploits of Don Black, a loving husband who is kidnapped by aliens intent on using him for scientific experimentation on their home planet. The journey to the extraterrestrial world, however, takes an unexpected detour when the alien spacecraft carrying Don crashes on a planet teeming with carnivorous monsters and ruled by gigantic, telepathic spiders. Making matters worse, another race of aliens led by a time-snatched Adolf Hitler arrives with plans to assume control of the planet and use its unlimited resources to conquer the galaxy. Can Don help prevent Hitler and his army of space Nazis from causing another Holocaust, this time one on a galactic scale that targets all intelligent life forms?
Below is a link to the Amazon page for THE NINTH LEG.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Ninth-Leg-ebook/dp/B005HJMQ4C/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1318915625&sr=1-1
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