Month: October 1998
The Irish Hellfire Club: No Smoke Without Fire
The history of Dublin's Hell-Fire Club, Rathfarnham. Overlooking Dublin city from the south west, at an altitude of 383m (1264ft), is a foreboding ruined hunting lodge, marked on Ordnance Survey maps as the 'Hell-Fire Club'. Current urban lore insists on telling us that it was - and still is - a site commonly used for the practice of 'Satanism' and other occult activities, and that the Devil himself made a brief appearance there at some unspecified time in the past. In a story similar to the one attached to Loftus Hall (a haunted house on the Hook Peninsula), a mysterious stranger seeks shelter on a stormy night, and a card game ensues. A member of the household drops a card, and sees that below the table, the otherwise affable and charming visitor has a cloven hoof. His or her screams made the Devil 'aware of her discovery, and he at...
Straddling Two Worlds: Lake Monsters and other weird creatures
Blather's 'man on the street' encountered U.S. cryptozoologist Nick Sucik in Dublin last week, and much nattering was done about the state of Irish animalous anomalies. Nick seemed quite surprised at the 'problems' that arise when investigating Irish mystery beasties - such as reports of huge animals inhabiting tiny lakes with inhospitable ecosystems - to paraphrase Peter Costello (author of In Search of Lake Monsters), 'They all live in puddles'. When pressed to comment on whether I think there's any zoological basis for Irish lake monsters - e.g. horse-eels. - I have to answer that apart from explaining some sightings as 'real' known animals, I would find it difficult to entertain the idea of any new species being discovered here. For example - in the case of Achill Island - large, unknown bipedal creatures residing in an exposed corrie lake (steep-walled amphitheatre or half bowled-shaped hollow cut into a mountainside)...
Virgin Mary: Appearances in Georgia, Ireland
Blather has, in the past, made the odd reference to 'herself', as in the Virgin Mary, apparent mother of Christ, traditionally popular here in Ireland. With a social diary to rival that of Irish President Mary McAleese (and touching that of former President Mary Robinson), the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVM) has recently turned up on fridges in New Jersey, on Mexican cakes, dented Chevy fenders and sewage drains, in Georgia (Europe), and in Spain as a statue that 'cried blood' (the crying was later decried by the Church). She's back again, this time in Georgia...USA This week some 100,000 pilgrims arrived at the farm of Nancy Fowler, in Conyers, 56 km (35 miles) west of Atlanta, and not for the first time either... on the 13th of every month between October 1990 and May 1994, Ms. Fowler 'relayed' messages from the BVM. Lately, she's cut back to annual October 13th...
Eamon Ansbro: No Threat Whatsoever
Blather's favourite Irish ufologist - Eamonn Ansbro - is back in the news once again, this time in the Sunday Tribune of October 4th, under the headline Alert: Aliens pose no real danger. Longtime Blather readers may recall War of the Wetlands, an issue from December 1997, which recounted how this writer, like an eejit, spent an entire Sunday evening monitoring the endeavours of the ICUFOS (Irish Centre for UFO Studies) on Bull Island, Co. Dublin. The date was December 14th, the night that Ansbro had predicted would be fraught with UFOs, using Roy Dutton's rather dubious Astronautical Theory. He claimed that Dublin, Boyle (Co. Roscommon) and Bantry (Co. Cork) were to be the best places to see the UFOs. Back then, Blather commented on the curious correlation between the ICUFOS predictions, and the Geminid meteor showers, which started on December 13th. Ansbro's prediction for the ultimate in UFO viewing...
Super Sargasso Surfin’
After spending any reasonable amount of time recording and cataloguing the odder aspects of daily life on this planet, certain conclusions almost beg to be arrived at, such as "people are generally speaking, nuts," or that perhaps half the population really are more intelligent than the average person. But from these studies, one starts to get a grasp on the "bigger picture" that Charles Fort and hundreds of others have devoted so much time, in some cases even their lifetimes, examining. In the last year, while researching my weekly email newsletter, Blather , several events and a few tenuous mental tangents brought me to consider Fort's humorous hypothesis on the "Super-Sargasso Sea," an aerial ocean from which eels migrate back to old mother earth, aided by the wonderful force of gravity. But when rather out-of-date military projectiles and then--saints preserve us--people starting falling out of the sky, questions arise about...
Klaatu Barada Nikto – The Day the Earth Stood Still
Last weekend, the BlatherGHQ TV was accidentally powered-up and tuned on to The Day The Earth Stood Still, a 1951 extraterrestrial contact movie directed by Robert Wise and adapted by Edmund North from Harry Bates' 1940 short story, Farewell to the Master. We relaxed, enjoyed it, and casually prepared to note any motifs which may have influenced today's interest in UFOs, alien abduction, and extraterrestrial life. All the typical material was there - the classic saucer shape, the silver space suits, terror on the streets, silvery robots carrying panicking female leads into spaceships, and the usual 'save the planet' kinda jazz. All the usual style of US movies from the era of the Cold and Korean Wars was represented in the film, and the accompanying baggage communist paranoia, but is in this case somewhat anti-military, while gently ridiculing the 'reds under the beds' mindset. However, it was uncanny how closely...