mysteries

Chris Knight's avatar
My book Keeping the Tryst has been out for a little over a month and a half now.  It’s been doing pretty well sales-wise.  Okay it’s NOT a bestseller by any stretch.  But enough people have been buying and reading it to make me pretty happy so far.  Maybe there will come to be some word of mouth and knowledge about it will spread around.
People are reading it.  And their comments have been rather kind.  One of my friends said that it’s a real page-turner that he’s barely been able to put down.  A number of people have praised its readability, saying that it doesn’t come across as a 500-some page volume.  I’ve also gotten good word about the design: it’s page color, the font size… so it’s something comfortable on the eyes.  Considering that I had to design everything about this book, hearing those things makes me smile.
...
Read more

Chris Knight's avatar
Mysterious bar code on the ground, United States, Cold War, surveillance aircraft, spy satellites
The “bar code” at Walker Field, Maryland

Adjacent to the runway of a Navy airfield in Maryland is a paved rectangle.  And within that area are a series of quadrilaterals painted bright white, in pairs and ascending in size.

By itself its existence would be a mystery, or at least a curiosity.  Except that it is one of dozens to be known throughout the United States, with most of those found near military bases and other restricted facilities.  Some remote locations have entire arrays of the “bar codes” stretching for miles toward the horizon.

So what are these test pattern-ish arrangements?  Based on available evidence, they seem to have been put in place by the government during the first few decades of the Cold War.  With tensions high between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the advent of high-altitude aircraft reconnaissance – and then “spy” satellites – became an important ...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

Sixty-six years after he disappeared into the prisons of the Soviet Union, new information has been discovered about the fate of Raoul Wallenberg.

Raoul Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat who became one of the most revered heroes of World War II. At the height of the Holocaust, Wallenberg was able to rescue and shelter tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews who would have otherwise been dispatched to the concentration camps. When the Soviets liberated Budapest early in 1945, Wallenberg was taken into custody by the Russians on suspicion of being a spy for the United States. His fate remains unknown to this day. The Soviets reported two years later that Wallenberg had died in his cell… but there are reports that he was seen alive as late as 1987.

Now two researchers who have studied the case for decades have announced that they have discovered old Soviet files pertaining ...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

For two days now this has been wigging me out. Think y’all will understand why as you read on…

Saturday afternoon my girlfriend arrived at my house. It’s about a hundred miles or so between where we live (only an hour and a half of drive time, and less if the Virginia state troopers aren’t looking :-P). She came at 2 and we were hanging out here when a short while later in the afternoon we noticed something on the front bumper of her car.

At first we thought it might be part of some animal that she had hit (though she couldn’t remember ever hitting one, which is better than can be said about Yours Truly, but anyhoo…) But when we went out to look at it, it wasn’t long before we had wished that it was a piece of roadkill, ‘cuz we can not figure out how this ...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

Awright, so at this point we’ve got…

…Thousands of dead fish and birds in Arkansas

…Thousands of dead fish in a river in Florida

…Bunches of dead birds in Kentucky

…More dead birds in Louisiana

…Thousands of dead fish in the Chesapeake Bay area

…Dead fish in New Zealand

…Countless birds found dead in Sweden

…Tons of dead fish washing ashore in Brazil

…Thousands of dead birds found in eastern Texas

So, what’s going on here? This kind of thing worldwide, I’m rather reminded of what Goldfinger told James Bond: that first is happenstance, a second time is coincidence, a third time or more is… something else?

No, don’t go calling me a “conspiracy theorist” or anything like that. But any person would be hard-pressed not to admit: that is a rather peculiar (and disturbing) pattern going on lately.

EDIT 4:29 ...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

Very unusual and perplexing news coming out of Baltimore this morning: the Poe Toaster did NOT show up to make his/her annual tribute to Edgar Allan Poe! For the first time since the ritual has been recorded – at least since 1949 – it simply didn’t happen.

Every year on Poe’s birthday of January 19th, in the very early morning hours, a mysterious figure has come out of the darkness to visit the original burial site of Poe. The Poe Toaster leaves roses and a bottle of cognac, and then disappears just as quickly as he (or she) arrived? Nobody knows who this person is. And thankfullly the Poe Toaster has been left un-harassed during the course of the tradition: there should be some mystery still left in this world, yes?

But this year, for the first time ever, the Poe Toaster failed to come.

Jeff Jerome, the ...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

Shades of Michael Crichton’s Timeline, or television’s Lost: archaeologists are stumped at the discovery of a Swiss watch within a Chinese tomb that was sealed more than four hundred years ago. While excavating the Ming-era tomb in southern China, researchers heard a metallic object hit the floor. When they picked it up they discovered, encrusted with the detritus of time, a tiny watch stopped at 10:06 and with the word “Swiss” engraved on the back.

Four hundred years ago there were no watches. And Switzerland didn’t even exist as the country as we know it today. The watch itself is thought to be around one hundred years old.

The archaeologists have stopped with the dig until experts from Beijing can arrive to help unravel the anachronistic riddle....

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

The New York Times is reporting that Hormel is pulling out all the stops to keep up with a sudden demand for Spam. The classic “mystery meat in a can” was first introduced over seventy years ago and ever since has become a staple food for hard economic times, having cemented that status during the lean years of World War II. And now as many seriously wonder if we might be on the cusp of another Great Depression…

Hormel declined to cooperate with this article, but several of its workers were interviewed here recently with the help of their union, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union Local 9. Slumped in chairs at the union hall after making 149,950 cans of Spam on the day shift, several workers said they been through boom times before — but nothing like this.

Spam “seems to do well when hard times

...
Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

It was one of the most tantalizing mysteries of the Twentieth Century. And had I not been so busy with other things, I would not have missed the announcement about three weeks ago that the last members of Tsar Nicholas II’s family had finally been found…


Nicholas II, the last tsar of Russia, and his family in a photo taken in 1911

Nicholas and his family, along with several faithful servants, were executed by the Bolsheviks in the town of Yekaterinburg on July 17th, 1918, a little over a year after his abdication from the throne. Rumors and legend have persisted over the decades that at least one of the Romanov children survived the slaughter. Most fancifully, it’s been suggested that Nicholas’ only son Alexei and youngest daughter Anastasia had somehow been secretly spared.

In 1991, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, the remains of Nicholas II and most of ...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

Call it the Zapruder Film of monster movies: right now the Internet is buzzing with discussion about what might have happened in the very last shot of Cloverfield, which opened yesterday.

I went to see Cloverfield yesterday afternoon, and last night I posted my review of it. It wasn’t long afterward that an anonymous reader made the following intriguing comment…

In case you are wondering where the monster came from in the closing scene where it is one month previous and they are at the beach if you look out over the ocean in the distance an object (presumably the monster) falls from the sky and right as it hits the water the camera turns to beths face. This is the only hint that the director said he put in there as to where the monster/creature came from. If you are going to see it again this weekend

...
Read more