The Glomar Response

The term "Glomar Response" in law - meaning a "neither confirm nor deny" response to Freedom of Information Act requests - comes from a ship called the Hughes Glomar Explorer, which was ostensibly owned by mysterious and eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, but was actually a CIA project.

In 1972, Hughes was approached by the CIA to help covertly recover the sunken Soviet submarine K-129. The Soviet sub, allegedly containing nuclear missiles, had sunk near Hawaii four years earlier. Thus a special-purpose salvage vessel for "Project Azorian" (aka "Project Jennifer") was born, and Hughes' involvement provided the CIA with the plausible cover story of being a research vessel searching for undersea manganese nodules.

Wikipedia on the K-129:

After having successfully completed two 70-day ballistic-missile combat patrols in 1967, K-129 was tasked with her third patrol to commence 24 February 1968 with an expected completion date of 5 May 1968. Upon departure 24 February, K-129 reached deep water, conducted its test dive, returned to the surface to report by radio that all was well, and proceeded on patrol. No further communication was ever received from K-129, despite normal radio check-ins expected when the submarine crossed the 180th meridian, and when it arrived at its patrol area.

By mid-March, Soviet naval authorities at Kamchatka became concerned that K-129 had missed two consecutive radio check-ins. First, K-129 was instructed by normal fleet broadcast to break radio silence and contact headquarters; later and more urgent communications all went unanswered. By the third week of March, Soviet naval headquarters declared K-129 "missing", and organized a massive air, surface and sub-surface search and rescue effort into the North Pacific from Kamchatka and Vladivostok.

This highly unusual Soviet surge deployment into the Pacific was correctly analyzed by U.S. intelligence as probably in reaction to a submarine loss. U.S. SOSUS Naval Facilities in the North Pacific were alerted and requested to review recent acoustic records to identify any possible associated signal. Several SOSUS arrays recorded a possibly related event on March 8, 1968, and upon examination produced sufficient triangulation by lines-of-bearing to provide the U.S. Navy with a locus for the probable wreck site. One source characterized the acoustic signal as "an isolated, single sound of an explosion or implosion, 'a good-sized bang'."

Soviet search efforts, lacking the equivalent of the U.S. SOSUS system, proved unable to locate K-129, and eventually Soviet naval activity in the North Pacific returned to normal. K-129 was subsequently declared lost with all hands.

As the story goes, eager to recover the sub and gain Soviet military secrets, the CIA took the Glomar to the spot and attempted to dredge it up from the ocean floor. The official story says that only a third of the sub was retrieved, as its hull broke up during the effort. Other sources claim the entire sub was brought back intact, and that the "it broke" version was yet another cover story within a cover story, to further conceal our Government's possession of classified Soviet materials if the project were to be found out.

And in 1975, that's just what happened. The New York Times planned an expose on the Glomar, but held the story back when the Nixon administration privately urged them to do so, on the rationale that it could cause a dangerous international incident if the truth were known. The Los Angeles Times also got wind of the story, ignored Nixon's requests, and ran the story anyway. After the cat was out of the bag, the New York Times went ahead with their article also.

When journalists attempted to get more info via the Freedom of Information Act, the CIA refused to either confirm or deny the existence of such documents. This type of evasive reply has since come to be known as the "Glomar Response" or "Glomarization."

But does the coverup stop there?

For every odd event related to the CIA, espionage, and secrecy, there's always someone on the internet who wants to bring extraterrestrials into it. The Glomar case is no different, but there is some food for thought in the idea that the real purpose of Project Azorian was to recover an alien craft that crash-landed in the ocean.

If you're willing to wade waist-deep in that swamp, start here and here and also here. And check out Bob Lazar's site when it comes back online, which is supposed to be any second now. Lazar, famous for his claims of insider knowledge of Area 51, is regarded variously as a genius or a charlatan. As is the usually the case, the truth likely falls somewhere in between.

Lazar is quoted as having said that the aliens arrived in the vessel from the fourth planet of the second star of the binary stellar system Zeta Reticuli. He also claimed to have seen a total of nine different types of alien spacecraft, and viewed autopsies of alien corpses. Recovered crafts such as that allegedly obtained by the Glomar were supposedly taken to Area 51 to be studied and reverse-engineered. Others have claimed that some of that reverse engineering is done by Raytheon at Kentucky's Blue Grass Army Depot.

Pictures from Life's Other Side

"This doesn't matter. None of this matters. All that matters is that we felt it."


"There's always a choice, brother."


"I saw it. Just for a moment, I saw what it looked like."


"Hallucinations, seeing things that aren't there."


"You saw something, didn't you?"


"A certain unpredictability comes with the territory."


"He said this is quantum mechanics."


"Imagine something terrible is about to happen, something catastrophic, and the only way to stop it from happening is by releasing a huge amount of energy."


"It happened to you too, didn't it? You felt it."


"When do we start?"

The Little Colonel

One from our Unusual Kentucky blog:


All but forgotten now except to historians, classic film buffs, and a few other people in the know, is the Victorian-age meme of the "Little Colonel".

There's a theatre company in Pewee Valley (just outside Louisville) called the Little Colonel Players; perhaps you've seen their logo with an odd little character in a Napoleonic hat. But from whence did this concept originate?

Annie Fellows Johnston wrote a series of novels dealing with the aristocracy These were semi-biographical and based on actual local people and places. The stories were set in Lloydsborough Valley, which was actually a fictionalized version of Pewee Valley. Johnston, originally from Indiana, eventually made Pewee Valley her home, and she died there in 1931.


Among the books in the "Little Colonel" series: The Little Colonel in Arizona, The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor, The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation, The Little Colonel's Hero, The Little Colonel's House Party, The Little Colonel's Holiday, The Little Colonel at Boarding School, Little Colonel's Knight Comes Riding, and The Little Colonel's Chum, Mary Ware. (From that last one, she spun off a popular series of "Mary Ware" books.) Other books in her decidedly dated oeuvre include Miss Santa Clause of the Pullman, The Rescue of the Princess Winsome, Georgina of the Rainbows, It was the Road to Jericho, Mildred's Inheritance, and Ole Mammy's Torment.

In 1935 a film adaptation was made, starring Shirley Temple and Lionel Barrymore. And after that, Johnston and her beloved characters seemed to vanish down the memory hole. Lists of popular Kentucky authors - even specifically lists of ones from the Victorian age - often omit Johnston and her "Little Colonel" books.


In the stories, the Little Colonel (a young girl), draws inspiration from "The Old Colonel" (a Southern Gentleman who had lost his arm in the Civil War):

"Along this street one summer morning, nearly thirty years ago, came stepping an old Confederate Colonel. Every one greeted him deferentially. He was always pointed out to new comers. Some people called attention to him because he had given his right arm to the lost cause, some because they thought he resembled Napoleon, and others because they had some amusing tale to tell of his eccentricities. He was always clad in white duck in the summer, and was wrapped in a picturesque military cape in the winter."

The Old Colonel was a thinly-veiled dramatization of one George Washington Weissinger, Jr., a well-known lawyer in Louisville and Middletown. He's buried in Cave Hill Cemetery, but visiting his grave is tricky. According to littlecolonel.com:

Cave Hill Cemetery (the most prestigious burial ground in the region) has records that the Old Colonel was buried on February 25, 1903, his wife two months later. A plot map shows the exact location of the graves. But there are no tombstones or grave markers. Why? We don't know. We also can find nothing about the death of Amelia Pearce Weissinger (born Amelia Neville Pearce), his wife, just before her interment beside him on April 30, 1903.

And David Domine, in his great book Haunts of Old Louisville, reports sightings of an elderly one-armed ghost in a Civil War uniform, fitting the Old Colonel's description perfectly.

rabbitus idioticus delicious

Theresa Berkley

Who was Theresa Berkley?

She was a celebrated Victorian-age dominatrix who specialized in flogging and flaggellation. We don't know what she looked like, unfortunately - no photograph, drawing or portrait of her is known to have survived. (The image above is merely a photo-illustration of some unknown Victorians engaging in erotic spanking.)

But we do know a little something about Theresa's livelihood.

The great pervert Henry Spencer Ashbee (aka "Pisanus Fraxi") wrote in his landmark pornographic reference work Index Librorum Prohibitorum:

The queen of her profession was undoubtedly Mrs. Theresa Berkley, of No. 28 Charlotte Street, Portland Place; she was a perfect mistress of her art, understood how to satisfy her clients, and was, moreover, a thorough woman of business, for she amassed during her career a considerable sum of money...

"Her instruments of torture were more numerous than those of any other governess. Her supply of birch was extensive, and kept in water, so that it was always green and pliant: she had shafts with a dozen whip thongs on each of them; a dozen different sizes of cat-o'-nine-tails, some with needle points worked into them; various kinds of thin bending canes; leather straps like coach traces; battledoors, made of thick sole-leather, with inch nails run through to docket, and currycomb tough hides rendered callous by many years flagellation. Holly brushes, furze brushes; a prickly evergreen, called butcher's bush; and during the summer, a glass and China vases, filled with a constant supply of green nettles, with which she often restored the dead to life. Thus, at her shop, whoever went with plenty of money, could be birched, whipped, fustigated, scourged, needle-pricked, half-hung, holly-brushed, furze-brushed, butcher-brushed, stinging-nettled, curry-combed, phletbotomized, and tortured till he had a belly full.

She also invented the Berkley Horse, an automatic flagellation machine still used in some S&M parlors to this very day.

Free Victorian House!

There's no catch - the house next door to Genny's Diner on Frankfort Avenue in Louisville is FREE to a good home.

As reported on Louisville Mojo, a judge has ordered Frank Faris to give away this great old Victorian mansion to anyone who wants to take it off his hands, since he has himself been unable or unwilling to make court-mandated renovations to the historic home.


Faris purchased the property for $100,000 years ago with the intent to demolish it, but the city declared it a historic building before he got around to that. Now he's forbidden to tear it down and saddled with the cost of maintaining it to code.

So yeah, I suppose there is a catch, and that was it. Anyone who takes the free building will find themselves with the same expensive task as Faris: trying to bring this crumbling, near-collapse edifice back to life.

Cherries Ripe, Boom-de-ay

Dan O'Brien's wonderful play The Cherry Sisters Revisited is playing at Actors Theatre of Louisville until April 11, and can't recommend it highly enough. Run, don't walk. Call now. Don't miss this chance to see one of the most important plays about the 19th century of the 21st century.

The Cherry Sisters - Addie, Effie, Ella, Jessie and Lizzie - were a group of spinster sisters from rural Iowa who formed one of the most notorious vaudeville touring acts of the late 1800s. Their traveling variety show featured musical numbers, dance routines, acrobatics, skits, morality plays and reading of essays - all authored and performed by the sisters, who had no training, formal or informal, at any of it.


Some of their songs were simply traditional standards with new lyrics substituted, such as their theme song being a rewrite of "Ta ra ra boom de ay":

"Cherries ripe, Boom-de-ay!

Cherries red, Boom-de-ay!

The Cherry sisters

Have come to stay!"

The soulless and hopelessly negative news media of today often randomly chooses things to go on crusades against for seemingly no good reason, but nothing can compare for the enmity it held for the Cherry Sisters. In 1930, Time Magazine noted: "In every town that the Cherry Sisters played, it was an invariable custom for the editor of the local paper to review their act with a column and a half of humor, satire, parody and biting sarcasm."

Cherry-bashing soon became a columnist's pasttime, and it soon reached the point where, even had the ladies put on a show that met their standards of taste, they almost certainly would still have lambasted them in print. Negativity sells papers.


Because of this unfair hounding, the Cherry Sisters soon developed a reputation for having an adversarial attitude to the media and to criticism. According to Wikipedia:

In January 1893, Fred P. Davis, the city editor of the Cedar Rapids Gazette, reviewed their performance at Greene's Opera House, noting, "...their knowledge of the stage is worse than none at all." The sisters demanded a retraction, and the Gazette complied, allowing them to write it themselves. The Cherry Sisters did not consider the retraction to be sufficient and accused Davis of libel. The complaint resulted in a light-hearted mock trial onstage at a Cherry Sisters performance in March 1893.

In 1898, the Odebolt Chronicle printed an extremely negative review of the Cherry Sisters' act, entitled "The Cherries Were Here". Critic and newspaper editor Billy Hamilton's piece described the sisters as being "three creatures surpassing the witches in Macbeth in general hideousness" and continued, "the mouths of their rancid features opened like caverns and sounds like the wailings of damned souls issued therefrom." The article was later reprinted in other newspapers around the state, including the Des Moines Leader.

In response, the Cherry Sisters sued the Chronicle and the Leader for US $15,000, claiming that the unflattering descriptions of their physical appearance presented in the article constituted acts of "false and malicious" libel. The Odebolt Chronicle kept an ongoing log of the progress of the proceedings, which included a courtroom performance by the sisters, noting on April 27, 1899, "we had lots of fun out of the case".

The Polk County Court decided in the newspapers' favor in 1899, and the sisters appealed to the Iowa Supreme Court. The Court upheld the verdict, stating in their May 28, 1901 decision, "the editor of a newspaper has the right, if not the duty, of publishing, for the information of the public, fair and reasonable comments, however severe in terms, upon anything which is made by its owner a subject of public exhibition, as upon any other matter of public interest; of privileged communications, for which no action will lie without proof of actual malice...Surely, if one makes himself ridiculous in his public performances, he may be ridiculed by those whose duty or right it is to inform the public regarding the character of the performance."

To this very day, the Cherry v. Des Moines Leader case is considered to be a landmark decision, setting a still-cited legal precedent regarding the media's right to fair comment and critical analysis. It was, as we see it, an unfortunate legal decision, one that opened the floodgates to the social disease of gossip columnists, trashy supermarket tabloids, and subhuman celebrity-dirt-dishing websites.


Even in her obituary, Jessie Cherry was not spared cruel mockery by the press. From the Daily Iowa State Press, October 6, 1903:

Jessie Cherry is Dead. Her passing recalls the occasion on which she appeared here, to vegetarian applause. Her greatest hit was appearing as the barefoot maiden in one of their songs, and many a newspaper ode has been written to her toes.

Their programs were so utterly unconventional and so entirely without artistic sentiment that they soon became a rage and the sisters were called to New York by a prominent vaudeville manager. There their fame grew and they followed up their financial success by a tour of the whole country. They had many exciting experiences and it became necessary for them to add to their stage accessories a large wire screen to stop the flood of bad vegetables which were nighly hurled toward the stage when they were singing.

One of the things I find most intriguing about O'Brien's play is its portrayal of Ella as being a sort of "idiot savant" clairvoyant, who foresees the future of her sisters, as well as her own. On a further occult note, the play makes extensive use of the concept of The Aether, and we gradually become aware that Effie's fourth-wall-breaking monologues to the audience make a certain sort of internal sense. She's stuck in a kind of purgatory, watching her life unfold again and again and again, trying to figure out what went wrong.


One by one the sisters died off, until Effie was the last woman standing. She opened a bakery in Iowa in her declining years, and reportedly sold only Cherry-flavored pastries. She passed away in 1944, her lifespan having bridged that mythically resonant space between the Civil War and World War II.

Cardboard Record Player

Seen on Gizmodo: Audio engineering company GGRP sent out this amazing cardboard record player as a promotional item. Comes mailed to you folded up, but all you have to do is quickly unfold it, place the record on its tiny spindle, and use a pencil to manually crank the record in a circular motion while the needle rests on its grooves. The sound is carried through the needle out through a tiny hole in the corrugated cardboard.

The Zen of OCD

Contrary to popular belief, obsessive-compulsive disorder isn't just for people who wash their hands too much or who go to absurd lengths to avoid unlucky numbers number 13 and 666.

The condition, if we are to believe the word of the psychiatric profession - and that's an immense "if" - can take many seemingly disparate forms, and its outer fringes can surprisingly open up a whole new realm of meta-compulsion that borders on hallucination:

Some people with OCD may sense that the physical world is qualified by certain immaterial conditions. These people might intuit invisible protrusions from their bodies, or could feel that inanimate objects are ensouled. These intuitions and feelings do not stem from socially accepted religious or metaphysical convictions, such as animism; even a child with OCD might find their obsessive notions ultimately silly. However, even if the OCD sufferer understands that their notions do not correspond with the external world, they feel that they must act as though their notions were correct.

For example, an individual who engages in compulsive hoarding might be inclined to treat inorganic matter as if it had the sentience or rights of living organisms, but such an individual might find their consequent behavior irrational on a more intellectual level. However, Insel and Akiskal (1986) noted that in severe OCD, obsessions can shift into delusions when resistance to the obsession is abandoned and insight into its senselessness is lost.

Clearly, this extended interpretation of OCD encourages the casual observer to accept the findings of psychiatry, and to follow it wherever it leads - but it is now seeming to lead into the realms of religion, spirituality, superstition, and by osmosis, inevitably, quantum physics, consciousness, and the mind.

We here at this steampunk-scented organization without a name hereby officially go on record as decrying any psychiatric interpretation of these mystical satori-like experiences - especially the bit about the perceived anthropomorphization of so-called inanimate objects - as bunk, hokum, and quackery.

What's next - accusing millions of practitioners of the Catholic faith of being mentally ill for believing in transubstantiation?

Or children who, with one part of their brain believe a stuffed animal to have a life-force and a sentient personality, while another part of their brain is well aware that the toy is made of synthetic fibers, came from K-Mart, and is not alive in a conventionally held sense?

The above-quoted Wikipedia text also notes that although most people experience intrusive images in their heads from time to time, the OCD patient's error is in attaching "extraordinary significance" to the thoughts.

What's so wrong about being extraordinary?

We plant a flag here in the name of the Algonquin Manitou, individually and collectively. Tuning in to their transmissions is not a mental illness.

Don't touch that dial.

Andree's Arctic Balloon Expedition

On July 11, 1897, Swedish balloonist Salomon August Andree set off on a mission to explore the North Pole via hot air balloon. On board with Andree were his engineer Knut Frænkel and a photographer named Nils Strindberg, who was a second cousin to the playwright August Strindberg.

The journey was cursed, due entirely to Andree's irrational decisions and unpreparedness. He refused to hear advice that the drag-rope steering technique he had invented for the balloon could be ineffective, and as it turned out the question was moot anyhow: the gondola immediately lost two of its three dangling ropes that Andree intended to function as a sort of rudder by providing drag against the ice. The system probably would not have worked well had they not lost the ropes, but without them, the balloon was virtually impossible to steer.

Only 295 miles into the trip, they were forced to make an emergency landing on floating drift ice after encountering storms. From there, they attempted to head East but after two months of trekking, they found they actually gone West because the unstable ice mass they were on was drifting backwards as they moved forwards. This not only wasted two months of time, it physically and mentally exhausted the explorers.

They finally reached the shores of Kvitøya Island but died shortly thereafter. Their diary entries stop just days after arriving on land, and just prior the men had all complained of severe diarrhea - now believed to have been the cause of their deaths, via ingestion of polar bear flesh carrying Trichinella parasites. Another theory is that they committed suicide by overdosing on opium, which they brought with them in plentiful quantity. Indeed, the final pages of the diary become incoherent and seemingly insane.

The expedition became a national mystery for Sweden, much like the Amelia Earhart disappearance is for Americans. For the next 33 years, the fate of Andree and his men was shrouded in mystery. Then in 1930, The Norwegian Bratvaag Expedition, conducting a scientific study of glaciers, found the remains of the Andree expedition.

A tin box containing Strindberg's photographic film plates was recovered, and the photographs were developed from them 33 years after they were taken. The image of the crash-landed balloon below is one of them.

The Oera Linda Book

Generally regarded as a hoax, this peculiar manuscript came to light in the 19th century and was presented as being an ancient text of a forgotten matriarchal Freyja cult. The book is dated 1256, and some adherents of its authenticity claim it is a copy of even older manuscripts that are supposedly written by several authors between 2194 BC and 803 AD.

The book is believed to have influenced H.P. Blavatsky, and because of its mention of the continent/island of Atlantis, it has been cited in many articles by proponents of that land's existence.

According to Wikipedia:

Within the first few years after the appearance of the Oera Linda Book, there was great skepticism concerning its authenticity, not only for the exceptional claims being made, but also because of a number of anachronisms it contained. Research was performed on the quality of the paper, and it was claimed to have come from a papermill in Maastricht circa 1850. This skepticism has not prevented the book from being a source of inspiration for a number of occultists, speculative historians, and political parties during the century or more since its emergence.

The authenticity of the book is supported by at least some Neo-Nazi groups, possibly because it indicates a Northern European origin for several Middle Eastern civilisations — this despite the fact that the book itself heavily criticises the ancestors of the Germans as uncouth barbarians.

You can view scans of the original document here and read an attempt at an English translation here.

Your Own Electron Microscope

Just when I think I'm ready to go downstairs and push the big red button on the internet and blow a kiss, something like this pops up like a gallery duck and restores my faith in its short-term potential.

Send in a sample of something and fill out a form, and the ASPEX Corporation will run it through their scanning electron microscope (for FREE!), and then post the images online for your retrieval (give them about 2 weeks turnover time on your job).

Click here to get started!