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 Wonder of Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World

I may have written about this TV series and book before, but really, I don't care. If I have, whatever sentiment I expressed at the time hasn't changed, so please accept my consistency over time, if not my memory.

I've been re-reading my small hardback copy of the book endlessly at work, and before that, I used to read it religiously every time I went to stay at my father's when I was young, scaring myself by reading it late at night, but unable not to and save myself some nightmares in the process. And further back, I remember seeing the TV series when it first appeared, and always having to turn my head away at the last second to avoid the Skull of Doom's terrifying gaze.

I had started to reading about UFOs at a similar sort of time, and was already a confirmed astronomy nut, 7 years old. But a scaredy cat one, the paradoxical stargazer uneasy in the dark. They all spoke of a world that opened up far beyond that of a reasonably teasable - if not bullied or utterly miserable by any means - little boy with platinum hair with muddy brown streaks in it, who never really fitted in.

It was a huge world, with no boundaries, inhabited by creatures of a fantastic nature, who unlike the monsters and creatures of the children's stories he found so, well, childish, there was a possiblity that they might exist. The Yeti maybe a far fetched thing to believe in, but it is still a far more likely thing to exist than a bad tempered troll beneath a bridge.

The Patterson Bigfoot film scared me witless, the film I saw for the first time on this television programme, the familiar jaunty man in a gorilla suit lolloping across the forest. The child me saw the still close up of the "creature's" face staring at the camera, out of the screen, and it made my heart judder.

There was the Alma, the Loch Ness Monster and the other wonderfully named water monsters Ogopogo, Manipogo, Champ, and Caddy. There was Loy's Ape, the Pgymy Elephant, the King Cheetah, the Giant Octopus, the Giant Squid. Many viewers may have been introduced to Fort and Forteana, and more scientific mysteries were covered, based around the rhyme and reason behind ancient sites like Stonehenge, Newgrange, the Nazca lines and the Chalk figures of the South Downs.

All these stories delivered with a slightly scary Gordon Honeycomb narration.



 Some of these creatures, like the Giant Squid and the beautiful (thanks to a mutation) King Cheetah, are now known to exist. This does not subtract from their near-fantastic nature.

And so, as I sat in a works canteen with rain lashing on windows, the grey endless outside, the grown up me read of these wonderful and strange entities and occurences, and it filled my brain with knowledge and transported me away. I wish the book were ten times longer.