Spiral Dreams

You just never know what the public will submit next to MUFON's UFO Case Files. The most recent example in the Kentucky reports comes from a man named Joe, who didn't actually see a UFO, but had a weird dream:

"On the night of Nov. 22, 2009, I had a most bizzare dream of being in a place and going outside and telepathically being told to lay down on the ground and look up. As I did, A large square shaped sort of opened up the sky, a sort of portal I suppose. At that time I saw inside of the openeing two discs which counter rotated and passed through each other. They came to a point where they would reverse course and repeat. I saw some stars in the background of this opening but they were of a different resolution than the others that were not in the opening in the dark sky. Immediately thereafter, a large spiral formed inside of the "portal" and another smaller spiral came from the center of this larger one and came to just above where I was laying on the ground. The reason I am reporting this is because on the early morning of December 9, 2009 there was a similar sighting over Norway that was said to be a Russian Bulava rocket launch which had failed creating the two spirals. When I saw this, I was intrigued and actually quite stunned because, it was basically, a reverse of what I had dreamed. I felt it was a strange synchronicity of sorts. In my dream there was the "opening" in the sky first followed by the large spiral and then the smaller spiral. In Norway, it was reported in reverse. It was first the small blue spiral, then the large spiral, then the black hole looking image as the spiral dissipated. Not a conventional sighting, but something strange has happened and I feel it is beyond statistical probability to be a coincidence. I was so taken by my dream, that I entered the details into my dream journal immediately upon waking. When the Norway event occurred I called my father right away to tell him about the spiral in Norway and then to read my description from my dream journal. Additionally, and unrelated, my two daughters witnessed twice int the same morning, roughly one week ago, a definite ufo which my daughter snapped a nice photo of with her iphone. I will ask her to submit it and fill out a report. I just happened to stumble onto this site from Google and felt compelled to report my incident. Although not a conventional "sighting", I felt it had a definite connection to extraworldly phenomena. Kindly, Joe."

Now usually, I'd regard "I had a crazy dream" posts on a UFO sighting board as Junk Data, but there's a lot going on with these weird spirals in the sky lately, much more than meets the eye. Enough high weirdness is in the air right now that I'm willing to give Joe some benefit of the doubt.

The official explanation is that it's just smoke from a Russian rocket that spiralled out of control, but many people aren't buying that explanation. And on the same evening as the mysterious Norway Spiral incident, there was a giant pyramid over Moscow. Some say it's related to the recent mysterious doings at CERN and HAARP. (Not to mention the Russian equivalent of HAARP, known as SURA.)

And there are still other similar phenomena going on right now, such as this and this and this.

Genny's Diner Owner Must Save or Sell House

Back in the summer, I took some pictures of the great old run-down building next to Genny's Diner on Frankfort Avenue in Louisville, and wondered why this beautiful old Victorian mansion was being allowed to rot and decay. Now a judge has ordered owner Frank Faris to either sell it, save it from collapse, or go to jail.

Read the whole story on my Louisville Mojo column!

The Beriah Magoffin Monument

Beriah Magoffin was Kentucky's 21st Governor, serving during the Civil War.

Magoffin, who attended Centre College in Danville and Transylvania University in Lexington, believed strongly in the right of states to secede from the Union. Though he was sympathetic to the Confederate cause, he supported Kentucky's position of neutrality in the war.

As far as Civil War-era Governors go, Magoffin really wasn't terribly notable and his actions in office did little to sway the conflict one way or the other. Historically, he is probably best known for his telegram to President Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln called for deployment of Kentucky troops on April 15, 1861, and Magoffin defiantly responded: "I will send not a man, nor a dollar, for the wicked purpose of subduing my sister Southern States."

After the Civil War ended, however, Magoffin became a civil rights advocate and urged passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.

His main legacy today is that he left behind an interesting tombstone: the Beriah Magoffin Monument is located in Spring Hill Cemetery in his hometown of Harrodsburg. The grave peculiarly renders Magoffin's bust in Neo-classical style, wearing a Roman toga.

Valley of the Drums

Way back in the day, most Bullitt Countians probably never gave much thought to the vast 23-acre expanse just outside of Louisville that was filled with chemical drums as far as the eye could see. After all, there was nothing illegal about such dumpsites back in our parents' generation. There were no laws regarding proper storage or containment of toxic waste.

That is, until it caught fire in 1966. It raged for over a week before firefighters could put out the chemical fire that filled Louisville's skies with some truly toxic smoke. This incident raised public awareness to the ecological disaster happening in Louisville's backyard, and eventually led to the Superfund act of 1980.

The Valley of the Drums, as it came to be known, was finally placed on the nation's list of most toxic sites in 1983, and it took them until 1990 to get it cleaned up to the EPA's satisfaction.


In 2003, the nearby creek sediment was discovered to be saturated with deadly PCBs. And in 2008, alarm was raised again when more rusting chemical drums that the cleanup crew missed were found on the periphery of the property. Further analysis showed the area is still contaminated by PCBs.

The Ouerbacker House

The long-abandoned Ouerbacker House, on the corner of 17th Street and Jefferson Street in Louisville, has been falling apart for years now. It's very strange, since it would seem to have been a prime piece of real estate at one time.

According to Broken Sidewalk, Metro Louisville took control of this property from a foreclosed tax business in 2005, but the property became even more abandoned during the city's stewardship, experiencing advanced decay, vandalism, and fires.



Recently there was some fear that the house would be disassembled and shipped elsewhere, but fortunately, it's not to be. There's a new Ouerbacker House Restoration Foundation that's reportedly working on saving the place and making it inhabitable again for future generations.

The Donder Society

Everyone knows that Santa has nine reindeer: Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen and Rudolph. (Well, not counting Egbert, Wilburn, Skippy, Smidgen, Angst, Bunsen, Kriemhild and Bob. But they're only the auxilliary backups in case of emergency.)

But guess what? You're wrong! It's actually Donder, not Donner, according to many scholars who know more about such things than you and I.

You may find this discrepancy to be less than Earth-shattering, but Louisville attorney Donald M. Heavrin has made it his life's calling to spread the word about the real name of this rogue reindeer. He's the commander-in-chief of the Donder Society, an ad hoc group dedicated to correcting the historical record and getting Donder's true name reinstated in popular usage. Each year about this time, the Society releases its annual report, letting the faithful know where we are in the great war against creeping Donnerian hegemony.

So what's the deal here? Well, it's complicated.

"A Visit from Saint Nicholas" made its first print appearance anonymously in New York's Troy Sentinel newspaper in 1823, and it had a reindeer named "Dunder". It was reprinted this way for the next thirteen years, until authorship was claimed by Clement Clarke Moore, a New Yorker of Dutch ancestry and professor of Biblical Studies at New York's General Theological Seminary. Moore published the poem in a book in 1844, and changed Dunder to Donder.


Thunder and lightning would be donder and bliksem in Dutch (transliterated) and donner and blitzen in German. The confusing part is that in naming Santa's two most majestic paranormally-powered Devil Deer "Thunder and Lightning", Moore chose to use one Dutch name and one German one. But hey, he can call 'em whatever he wants, it's his poem.

Or is it?

There's a growing revisionist school of thought that names another New Yorker of Dutch ancestry, Henry Livingston, as the story's true author. In 2000, scholar and textual analyst Donald W. Foster published his findings naming Livingston as the poem's actual source.

According to Snopes, which I regard as accurate only a quarter of the time, there have been many prior examples of Donder rendered as Donner, going as far back as 1906 in an article in the New York Times. However, I checked the online NYT database for 1906 and didn't find the article they speak of. Regardless, these examples are probably either typos or instances where editors well-versed in German thought they were cleverly correcting typos, mistaking Donder for Donner.

The real source of the Donner/Donder glitch was Gene Autry and his 1949 popular song "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer", which said Donner, not Donder, and thus cemented this nomenclature in the public consciousness for the rest of the century.


In 1939, a coloring book called "Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer" was created by Robert May for the Montgomery Ward department stores. This, in turn, led to Gene Autry's song in 1949. Together, the book and the song introduced this ruminant-come-lately to the Santa mythology, and many regard his presence as being not strictly "in canon".

Voting Rights for the Dead

I've always felt that the biggest problem with modern society is that it doesn't take into account its own big picture. To the average American - who knows more about football stats than his own country's history - Millard Fillmore, Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt might as well all be the same person or from the same time period. And the Bill of Rights means about as much to them as any other oblique and opaque document they had to study in school but never really understood, like the Magna Carta, the Emancipation Proclamation, or the Smoot-Hawley Act.

Despite the efforts of the ACLU and other organizations to try to hold the original spirit and structure of the U.S. Constitution in place, each generation of Americans is more ignorant than the last when it comes to basic civics. If only there were a way to keep the beliefs of the Founding Fathers alive in the brave new world of today.

A modest proposal:

Let's give voting rights to the dead.

And we can retroactively give a vote to the Founding Fathers, whose votes should count the largest, since they started this whole thing of ours, thus cancelling out the votes of the lowest common denominators who walk our streets today. (But of course, that doesn't include you, dear reader!)

Much of the atrocities we've seen in our lifetimes would never have been condoned by previous generations. Let's record how they felt and let their voices continue to carry weight today. Of course, there's the inverse problem that most of these older voices of cantakerous dead guys lack a certain progressiveness, and that many of them would not vote for things we take for granted today, like equal rights. This is, of course, why we need to give the biggest votes to the Founding Fathers and those who shared their ideals.

But on many pressing issues of the day, bringing in the dead-folks vote would help bring cohesion and fairness and save us all from an almost certain technocratic hell. Wouldn't you like to be able to vote now on certain things that may take place in the future, like "If, someday, it's proposed that we all have microchips in our asses that monitor our every move, do you support this?" and we can all vote "uh, no, thanks anyway, do not want."

What's more, we may not have to rely on the historical record of any given dead person's stated opinions to determine how they would have voted on modern issues. There's also the option of contacting them via channellers, spiritualists, Ouija boards, divination, what have you, and asking their ghosts directly what they think about, say, Obama's health care plan.

I submit to you an article found in the March 14, 1873 edition of the New York Times, in which an unattributed writer waggishly notes:

If ghosts continue to multiply with their present rapidity, there will have to be an addition made to the recent volume of census statistics. At the present rate, our ghostly population will soon far outnumber the Indians or the Chinamen, and we may expect to see a movement in favor of giving the rights of citizenship to resident ghosts, either by virtue of the phraseology of the fourteenth amendment, or on the pretext that they are included among the "other persons" mentioned in the original Constitution. A census that omits so important a part of our population is certainly incomplete...

The author goes on to illustrate two recent examples of ghostly incidents that had come to his attention; one was a pie-eating ghost in Ulster, and the other was in located in Kentucky. The author is somewhat geographically confused - there's no such thing as Lebanon County - but let's not let that spoil the anecdote:


(I especially liked the part about a flask of bourbon and a deck of cards being among the "articles necessary to the comfort of a Kentucky Gentleman", which called to mind my own words about how a good Transylvania Gentleman needs lots of pockets to hold all his swag.)

Of course, we could take the whole retroactive-rights idea even further and give a posthumous vote to each of the dead men and women who populated this hemisphere before the United States. That might be the fairest thing to do, even though it would almost certainly mean that most of us would find ourselves "voted off the island", so to speak.

Let's initiate a grass-roots campaign right now to stop disenfranchising our noble deceased ancestors, and to bring them in on the issues that face us young corporeal whippersnappers. To the polls, you spirits, spooks, and spectres!

Waterspout in Kentucky?

This puzzling datum is from the New York Times, August 24, 1901.

A waterspout on a creek? Seriously? Is that possible? A waterspout is, by definition, a funnel cloud that connects from a cumuliform cloud to a large body of water, usually the ocean or the Great Lakes.

Kidnapped by Elvis

A 14-year-old Bowling Green girl was almost kidnapped by two men from North Dakota.

42-year-old Dragan Jovanovic and 19-year-old Elvis Tahirovic, both residents of Fargo, ND, drove all the way to Bowling Green and attempted to sign the girl out from Henry Moss Middle School, pretending to have authorization to do so.

Unbeknownst to the bumbling would-be child-stealers - who really are starting to sound like Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare - the girl was absent from school and was safe at home. The school officials immediately saw through Elvis and Dragan's scam.


The Bowling Green Daily News has reported that both men, as well as Jovanovic's 14-year-old son, had met the girl online through a social networking site. Jovanovic pled guilty to second-degree unlawful transaction with a minor and is facing three years. Tahirovic's case is pending.

"Kamel" Graffiti Gang

Graffiti and vandalism have been a growing problem in Butchertown, and now four persons have been caught on security video vandalizing the Eye Care Institute building at 1536 Story Avenue. The "Kamel" gang are wanted by police for multiple counts of vandalism and criminal trespassing.


I'm of two minds regarding graffiti - on one hand, much of it is very beautiful and essentially harmless. On the other hand, some of it causes a lot of financial hardship for those whose homes and businesses have been vandalized by bored know-nothing teenage spray-painting retards. The problem will probably only continue to grow, unfortunately, and is doomed to be among that set of signs-of-the-times that I call Unsolvable Problems.


Click here for more details in my Louisville Mojo column.

Kentucky Ale Beer Cheese

One from our Transylvania Gentlemen blog:


Yes, dear friends, long and arduous is the gravel road I have traveled, lo, these many years to seek out prime examples of the uniquely Kentuckian tradition known as Beer Cheese.

Many times have I been on safari, deep in the heart of darkest Boonesboro, making my way through a sea of drunken river rats with lunch in their beards, salty women whose hair smelled of Suave conditioner and fried chicken, disreputable hillbilly mechanics in back rooms of garages in parts of Madison County that bear no name, and smoky rural diners with yellowing countertops and teeth. I've nocturally traversed tick-filled weedy farmlands with justified and ancient cornfields, and I've slogged knee-deep in black rotten stinking creek mud to get from Point A to Point Beer Cheese, ever seeking what's around the next corner, the next door, the next tree, the next quantum particle.

And I did it all for you, dear reader; your humble servant am I. Selah.

In the course of these scholarly duties and advanced Appalachian studies, this jaded palate has experienced it all - or so I thought. But Kentucky Ale Beer Cheese is a new taste sensation for me.

It differs from the lowbrow pepperiness of Southern Salads and the steady, stoic blandness of Hall's store-bought spread and the Popeye-muscled horseradish power of River Rat. The synergy of Kentucky Ale with this Beer Cheese somehow gives a downright mustard-like tang. Sure enough, there it is in the ingredients: mustard powder. Beauty!

The texture is grainy, not gloppy, and - this is the mark of a truly worthy Beer Cheese - it makes me wanna ditch the crackers and just eat the damn stuff right oughta the tub with a butter knife.

Funny thing is, I don't even particularly care for Kentucky Ale as a beer. One of the little ironies of life in the commonwealth. (Now, their super-fancy Bourbon-barrel ale is a whole 'nother story. Mmmmm, that's the stuff!)