Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World

I've always been interested in UFOs, Lake Monsters and other Cryptids, and as the famous UK magazine called it, "The Unexplained". And that is despite knowing it all to be nonsense.

I think it is always going to be a part of humanity to want their lives to be full of mysteries, to not want everything to be explained lest the world becomes boring.

I can't remember when I became interested in all this stuff, but I've got a feeling that Arthur C.Clarke's Mysterious World, which was first shown in around 1980, was a big part of it.

Right from the crystal skull - a wonderful object we now know to be a modern fake - rotating to face the camera in the opening titles and causing the terrified me to look away before its unearthly eyes gazed upon my child face.

There were, I think, 12 episodes, some dealing with non-supernatural stuff we don't know the purpose behind - chalk figures, the Nazca Lines, the Tunguska event etc - that I as a child found a bit humdrum compared to the episodes that dealt with the real hard stuff - The Loch Ness Monster, UFOs, Yetis and Bigfoot.

Narrated by soon to be TV-AM newsreader Gordon Honeycomb in doom laden tones - "Is this a photograph of Nessie's flank?" - I have always remembered the story of the Scottish forestry worker who was attacked by two spiky balls that emerged from a spaceship.

The (faked) photography of the Loy's Ape cryptid was always pretty scary too.

But the most famous imagery from the show, to me anyway, is the Patterson Bigfoot film from 1964. Now accepted to be a pretty blatant "man in a suit" fake, back in the day it attracted serious scientific study from academics, and serious outbreaks of sleeping with the light on from me.

All text Copyright Bloody Mulberry 16.08.20

The Nessie Submarine

I am remembering a story I wrote at Primary School, many many years ago, in my dark blue jotter, on the scratchy cheap paper found within. It had terrible illustrations to go with it, radar traces, underwater worlds, the techno tech imagined by the mind of a ten year old boy in 1983.

It was all about an attempt to prove the existence of the Loch Ness Monster.

There was a submarine, and it dived to a depth of 58,000 feet in the Loch because there were secret trenches down there and I didn't have any idea of the real depth (700 feet or so) of the Loch.

The monster was 65 feet long – the exaggeration of childhood – and a long sea serpent kind of thing, drawn in dark green coloured pencil. The submarine was rocket like, and may or may not have been bright yellow – my head was permanently full of “Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World” at this time, endlessly read by me every time I went to stay at my father's house.

It was cramped inside, furnished in purple luxurious...er...stuff. There was barely room to move. I used to pretend to be inside it in real life, in my duvet, before my younger sister would crash in, in her annoying bundle of toddler life fashion.

As well as the Nessie Submarine, there was the Mattress Spaceship from a couple of years earlier. Me and a friend used to lie on the bed on our backs, with our legs up the wall in a kind of proper astronaut position. He always got to be Neil Armstrong, I was always David Scott for some reason, but then he was older, and half American to boot. We used to get signals from Houston, and activate various systems by pulling on the cord that switched my light on and off, disturbing the gerbils that lived in a cage on a high shelf, in constant fear of Tiggy the cat.

So, there my lifelong sceptical interest in crypitids and space began, in bedrooms and jotters, in the house of the artist and captain in Scotland, and in the imagination of an only child, in what for a while was a single parent family at what Doctor (not Mr!) Spock would have said was a crucial time.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 04.02.14