paranormal – Go Retire Psychiatrist

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pentagon

So, just for laughs I sometimes watch Ancient Aliens (you know, the UFO show with the hair dude). Last night, they were talking about some guy named Valiant Thor as if he were a real person. Maybe some of you know about the book, “Stranger at the Pentagon,” which you can read for free on the Internet Archive. I just quickly clicked through the pdf of it and it’s pretty interesting. The one I saw had sections about Men in Black (MIB) in it, which of course means Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones are even older than we think.

It was written in 1967 by Dr. Frank E. Stranges and it’s supposedly a story of an extraterrestrial named Valiant Thor who presented to the White House in the 1950s and spoke to President Eisenhower and others, giving the urgent message that Earthlings need to shape up or the planet would be destroyed.

OK, the spoiler is that there’s no evidence this ever happened, although many people, like Fox Mulder, want to believe.

I want to believe, too but there’s no official record Vai (as Valiant Thor is sometimes called in the book) ever lived at the White House, although maybe he snorted something you can sometimes find in the White House but nobody officially will admit that ever happens either.

One person stated that the idea for the book might have come from the 1951 film “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” Artificial Intelligence (who always butts in to my web searches) doubted it’s ever been on the Svengoolie TV show, but I found a Facebook post from 2025 which called it a “Sven fan favorite.” It’s probably never been on Svengoolie because it’s far too classy. There’s an interesting article about it on Turner Classic Movies but I don’t know if TCM ever showed it.

As near as I can tell from just from what I’ve read on the web about this movie is that it was made in the early Cold War days and it’s really sending a message to mankind warning them away from killing everybody and the planet and instead strive to establish peace in the world. It’s long been regarded as a cinema masterpiece.

Did it influence Dr. Stranges to write the book “Stranger at the Pentagon”? I don’t know, but some people think so, judging from one social media comment. I think that person might have been put off by the attempt to make it sound like it was historically accurate, which is what many people seem to think.

In my opinion, the whole yarn about Valiant Thor is fiction that, while not historically accurate, is compelling enough to make you think about how important it is for national leaders and people who live on the planet to try and clean up our act. Efforts to make this story seem like it actually happened backfires and misses the point.

By the way, none of this has anything to do with Bigfoot.

Upcoming Svengoolie Movie: “Dracula” (1931)

So, the upcoming Svengoolie movie is “Dracula” released in 1931 starring Bela Lugosi. They tried to get George Burns to star in it, but he refused to take the cigar out of his mouth long enough to put the fangs in.

I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen this classic vampire flick in which the story differed from the Bram Stoker novel in that Soupy Sales was substituted to play Renfield who traveled to Transylvania instead of Jonathan Harker to sell real estate to Count Dracula. This, of course, could only be accomplished by contacting the extraterrestrials to create a wormhole in which time travel could be accomplished by bending the wormhole tightly enough to snatch Soupy from the future, which was lucky because it prevented him from making the disastrous on-air joke in 1965 in which he “suggested” to kids to get “green pieces of paper” (money) from their parents and mail it to him.

If you don’t remember the story that way then you’re either suffering from the Mandela Effect or the ETs got to you as well.

Anyway, except for the switch in characters, the action goes pretty much to plan the way Stoker wrote it up except for the ironic issue of Lugosi actually being quite fond of garlic which led to him eating the stuff while filming in addition to filching it in between takes and taking it back to his trailer to share it with Lon Chaney, who was feeling pretty bad for not getting the Dracula role in the first place because, despite it being offered to him first, he was later rejected because he couldn’t stop turning into the Wolf Man at inopportune moments during the screen test when the cue card person kept turning the card upside down. His growls sounded inside out, which struck the director as silly, which got him laughing so much he got the hiccups.

Anyway, Lugosi got the part and he’s remembered for unforgettable lines like the ones below:

Count Dracula: This is a very old wine. I hope you like it.

Renfield: Aren’t you drinking?

Count Dracula: I never drink since I took the pledge.

Well, I may have got a couple of details wrong, but that never hurts anything.

Svengoolie Movie: “The Gorgon”

Svengoolie Intro: “Calling all stations! Clear the air lanes! Clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!”

Well, last night I saw the 1964 Hammer Films movie “The Gorgon,” and the first thing to clear up is the name of the gorgon relating to the underlying Greek mythology which, incidentally, the Svengoolie show clearly did early on.

The gorgons were 3 ugly female creatures with snakes in their hair and if you looked at one of them, you’d turn to stone. The most well-known gorgon was Medusa, which Perseus defeated by only looking at her indirectly in a mirror and slicing off her head. Medusa was the only human gorgon and the other two were named Stheno and Euryale.

The problem is the gorgon’s name which is Megaera. Megaera was part of another trio of monsters in Greek mythology called the Erinyes (Furies). They also had snakes in their hair and their names were Megaera, Alecto, and Tisiphone (who is incorrectly identified as a gorgon in the film). They were the goddesses of vengeance who punished men for crimes like murder of relatives and lying. Gazing at them didn’t turn you into stone, but they could drive you crazy, and inflict disease if you didn’t laugh at your father’s Dad Jokes.

Moving right along, the movie begins with a lot of people in early 20^th century Europe being turned into stoners who smoke pot by the bongful, leading to Dr. Namaroff (Peter Cushing) noticing that many of them ended up getting institutionalized in the madhouse he runs in Vandorf, a small village in Germany, and where he occasionally removes the brains of some of the inmates and who also has a crush on his assistant, Carla Hoffman (Barbara Shelley).

Actually, the stoners literally turn into stone, presumed by some to be a result of the unbelievable potency of the local pot, but watch out, Prof. Karl Meister (Christopher Lee) has an amazing grasp of Greek mythology although even he can’t separate the Erinyes from the Gorgons.

There’s something weird going on and Meister gets a letter from Professor Jules Hetiz (Michael Goodliffe) who has a close encounter of the craggy kind which leads to Meister sending Paul Heitz (Richard Pasco) to dig into the mystery and also bring back some of that righteous pot.

However, Paul has a pretty bad trip on the stuff and ends up in Dr. Namaroff’s hospital for about a week convalescing. He and Carla really hit it off, which Namaroff gets pretty miffed about because Carla is his girl even if she is a little spooky. The local constabulary (the head of which is Inspector Kanof (Patrick Troughton, who was the second Doctor in Doctor Who in 1966) and is very protective of the secret which is behind all the broken furniture and homemade bongs in the forbidding castle in the neighborhood.

The gorgonizing secret of the whole affair gradually gets revealed in confrontation involving a snake pit in which a cobra bites Chuck Norris and after 7 agonizing days—the cobra dies.

I think the movie is fair but it gets the Greek mythology wrong. I give it a 2/5 Shrilling Chicken Rating. You can see it on the Internet Archive.

Try to Lift Just One Eyebrow Without Picking Your Nose!

I ran across a couple of interesting articles today and I thought I’d pass this along. One article is about kids who pick boogers out of their nose and eat them. Another is about how to lift one eyebrow only.

I bet a lot of people try to learn how to lift one eyebrow. I also bet that nobody would ever admit they pick their nose and dine on the boogers. Well, I never picked my nose but when I was in the 1^st or 2^nd grade, one of my classmates used to do this. The teacher would get really mad because no matter how many times she told him to stop, he would just do it anyway.

He tried to be sneaky about it, but pretty soon the whole class could catch him at it. We could barely get through class because we were so busy spying on him-and gagging when we caught him.

I tried to see if I could lift just my right eyebrow. I wondered if I could do it without much practice because I had surgery to repair a retinal tear on my right eye a few years ago. Does it look like my brow on the right is a little more wrinkled? See what you think. And can you tell if it’s more prominent if I stick an extraterrestrial up my left nostril? Examine the photos carefully. Take your time and get back to me. I did not eat the ET, I swear.

Groundhog Day Finally Explained

Well, by now everybody has heard the official news about what Punxsutawney Phil saw this morning since it’s Groundhog Day. On the other hand, the unofficial news is this: for some reason he saw extraterrestrials instead of his shadow. I know about it only because a drunken official calling me from the Pentagon spilled the beans to me and abruptly hung up just before he passed out.

Apparently, they were looking for a decent rib joint, which they’re always on the lookout for after traveling halfway across the galaxy.

You have to question the ETs preference for using so much fuel and creating missing time and hallucinations for thousands of people gathered for this time-honored and totally bogus event which the editors of The Old Farmer’s Almanac repeatedly try to debunk in a futile attempt to educate us about the seasons.

What almost nobody knows is that recently declassified government documents obtained by Brer Rabbit has led to the discovery of yet another conspiracy to hoodwink the American people about the ETs preoccupation with finding the best BBQ rib joint in the galaxy, which is genetically linked to their inability to distinguish humans from woodland creatures whose only real purpose in life is to dig holes in the ground so they can secretly write books circulated only amongst groundhogs about how silly it is for humans to call them ridiculous names like “whistle pigs.”

The truth is groundhogs know perfectly well how the seasons change and it has nothing to do with them—it’s all about the tooth fairy. But…ETs can’t handle the truth, as Col. Jessup has repeatedly pointed out in countless memes and gifs over the years.

We can only hope this deplorable state of affairs will be rectified when scientists eventually back engineer and reverse the polarities of the device (which is, trust me, stored in a cardboard box in a garage in Area 51) ETs use to hypnotize the criminals amongst their own kind into endlessly flying around in their souped up Tic-Tac UFOs in the absolutely pointless search for the perfect rib joint—all because the ET leaders can’t come up with a better solution to close the gaps in their worthless criminal justice system.

I hope I have made all this clear. Happy Groundhog Day!

Svengoolie Movie: “War of the Colossal Beast”

Svengoolie Intro: “Calling all stations! Clear the air lanes! Clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!”

I watched the movie “War of the Colossal Beast” last night. Sena saw only the first few scenes of it in the beginning because she took a bite out of a magical cake she got at Hy-Vee, grew into a giant (had to get a new roof), wandered downtown to the Ped Mall until she found a mushroom, nibbled on it till she shrunk down to normal size and didn’t get back home until the movie was over, so like always, I had to explain the show to her. Based on my Svengoolie movie “reviews” you can imagine how well that went!

Anyway, this movie was released by American International Productions in 1958 and it was a sort of but not really a sequel to their film “The Amazing Colossal Man,” released a year earlier. In that movie, a military man, Col. Glenn Manning got exposed to radiation in Las Vegas and grew to a height of 60 feet which meant he could hit the free throw shot from several miles away. He ran amok and the army lobbed bombs and shot bullets at him until he fell 700 feet off Boulder Dam and everybody assumed he died. Although there are restrictions on seeing this movie in certain venues because of a copyright restriction, you can find it on the web, including the Internet Archive.

In “War of the Colossal Beast,” the story picks up sort of where the not-really-a-prequel left off except, in the beginning of the movie, a lot of food trucks are disappearing from the roads. One of them belongs to John Swanson (George Becwar), a food truck owner whose truck got lost and says repeatedly to the police “Get the picture?” when he tells his account of what he knows about the theft. It doesn’t take long to “get the picture” that this is comic relief.

It turns out that Glenn Manning is filching food from trucks and he’s not sharing any of it with the 50-foot woman who has wandered over from a different movie set and is pretty hungry (partly because she drinks too much) after an extraterrestrial has zapped her with radiation leading to a sudden growth spurt.

A scientist, Dr. Carmichael (Russ Bender) and Maj. Mark Baird (Roger Pace) have “cooked up” a plan to catch Manning using Italian bread spiked with chloral hydrate and evidently, Manning’s sister Joyce (Sally Fraser) approves of this plan. Baird and Carmichael both taste the bread, and neither drops dead even though if there’s enough chloral hydrate in all that bread to knock out a 60-foot-tall man, there should be enough to kill a normal size man after just a small bite. Whatever.

After abandoning a plan to hire Manning to round up all the Bigfoot monsters in the country because he’s too brain injured to remember the details which is not to squash them beyond recognition and allow photographers to take photos of the operation, which may or may not have happened when the Van Meter Visitor (a huge pterodactyl) in Iowa hit town in the early 1900s and flew all over the place munching on the cattle until cowboys and farmers shot it down and then took pictures of it which people claimed they all saw in the local newspaper yet those issues are “not available” for some reason so I guess there’s some kind of Mandela Effect going on or some people are prone to telling “tall tales.”

In the meantime, Manning is being held down by ropes and chains and it’s obvious that he was brain injured in that 700-foot fall in the first encounter. His right eye is missing and some of his teeth are pushed to one side, possibly because of a roundhouse kick by Chuck Norris (himself) who caught him trying to steal his chloral-hydrate enriched Italian bread.

Somehow, Manning is able to pick the locks of his chains using the same hypodermic needle he harpooned somebody with in the first movie and which he hid in his giant adult diapers (yes, those would be Shorty’s Adult Diapers that Big Mo aka John Heim the KCCK radio wizard of the Big Mo Blues Show describes, “they’re ready when you aren’t!).

The action and the dialogue start to get more complicated towards the end, which I’m going to defer on revealing in order to avoid spoilers (OK, the butler did it).

This is an OK movie although the dialogue gets a little stilted toward the end. I give it a 3/5 Shrilling Chicken Rating.

The Extraterrestrial and Mutilated Soybean Hybridization Program in Iowa

After watching a number of TV shows about extraterrestrials (ETs), I had this vivid dream about ETs invading Iowa.

Apparently, I had somehow driven out on some highway that was not clearly marked, maybe Highway 20 which the National Weather Service always mentions as a sort of boundary line between a howling, disastrous tornadimohurricannibalistic storm and utter tranquility a few miles north of us.

I got out of the car and noticed up in the sky a gigantimonguous craft shaped like a triquetra. It was eerily silent as it passed just inches above my head and it glowed multiple colors like the NBC peacock.

Suddenly, 3 beings who resembled the 3 stooges (except their heads were tiny) floated out of the craft and took me hostage. They kept arguing amongst themselves about how they were going to exsanguinate me and then fuse me with a soybean plant they had previously mutilated. Apparently, they had tipped a few cows in the process and slipped in the pasture, falling into an area full of cow pies.

I told them they smelled bad and suggested they try Mando, the deodorant that is nothing like the scented stuff which, if you apply it, is exactly like turning up your car radio when the engine rattles—hey, it just masks the problem.

I guess that hurt their feelings and they told me they were going to stick some kind of implant in my nose so they could track me because they could hear my nose whistle and find me anywhere. I told them I’m allergic to ET implants and I would just sneeze it out. I had them there.

Then they tried to communicate with me telepathically but I knew how to counter that trick. I just thought really hard about good barbecued ribs, which made them hungry. They asked me where they could find a decent rib joint and I told them how to get to Jimmy Jack’s Rib Shack in Iowa City.

So we head on over there and I help them order. They weren’t sure what to drink, so I suggested water because I saw this trick in the movie, Signs. It didn’t work as I expected and they just acted like they were drunk.

Then, of all things, they wanted to go to Area 51, and we just zipped over there. On the way, they picked up Bob Lazar who drew pictures of them. He asked me why they had barbecue sauce all over their faces and I just told him they had bad manners.

Finally, I woke up and I swear I’m going to limit how much kale I eat next time.

Svengoolie Movie: “King Kong vs Godzilla”

I watched the 1962 movie “King Kong vs Godzilla” on the Svengoolie show last night and woke up this morning thinking it had to be a parody. So, I looked it up on the web and sure enough, there’s a Wikipedia article about the film stating director Ishiro Honda said it was a satire of the television industry in Japan.

This movie was pretty ridiculous and there was so much over the top slapstick comedy in it that I couldn’t believe anyone would see it as anything but satire. But the internet has many articles that don’t call it satirical.

I remember Sena watched some of it and asked me last night how I was going to rate it. I said “Zero!” at the time, before I found out it was satire. That was after I’d seen the two characters, Kinsaburo Furue (Yu Fujiki) and Keji Sahaka (Kazuo Fujita) encounter with the island natives who accepted gifts of cigarettes and a transistor radio as a bribe to gain their cooperation.

So, it seems superfluous for me to poke fun of it like I usually do with most of the films on the Svengoolie show. Even he joked about the poor dubbing in this movie.

I’m seeing this as satire and I’d give it a 2.5/5 Shrilling Chicken rating.

Upcoming Svengoolie Movie: “King Kong vs Godzilla”

I see the 1962 kaiju movie “King Kong vs Godzilla” is coming to Svengoolie this Saturday. I’m still trying to figure out if I’ve seen this one already. Maybe that’s because it looks similar to other kaiju films I’ve seen on the Svengoolie show, like “Godzilla vs Bozo the Clown,” another classic which I’m sure you’ve seen.

This may be the one where King Kong challenges Godzilla to a food fight at Wendy’s because Godzilla gulped down all the chocolate Frosty malts. It’s a pretty simple battle since all they do is throw the whole restaurant back and forth at each other which causes all the people trying to order burgers and fries to fall out of the building leading to both monsters skidding and slipping on the ketchup and cracking the streets open, which of course causes the storm and sanitary sewers to burst causing a messier flood of crap which doesn’t do anything to improve the taste of French fries. This just makes King Kong even madder because he can’t make his step over toe hold work because he slips in the slop. I think this is when Chuck Norris shows up because all the ruckus makes too much noise, distracting him from his sitar practice. Neither King Kong nor Godzilla dare look at Chuck the wrong way because the dinosaurs did that and you know what happened to them. Then, wouldn’t you know it, the Tall Man shows up, the same 10-foot-tall monster that allegedly haunted a small town and did some window peeking which scared all the townsfolk, an event which is described in the TV documentary, Paranormal Emergency. All three start doing their roundhouse kicks at each other, which Chuck Norris immediately stops by doing the same roundhouse kick in the time when in the beginning there was nothing and he kicked nothing and told it to get a job and…well, that’s probably not how this movie goes per se but you get my drift.

Sven Squad Movie: “Flight 7500”

Sven Squad Intro: “Calling all stations! Clear the air lanes! Clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!”

So last night we both watched the Sven Squad movie “Flight 7500.” It’s the Sven Squad leading the way because they’re going to give Svengoolie a well-deserved break once a month. However, he did show up a couple of times. We thought the Sven Squad song “Cabin Pressure” was pretty awesome.

Flight 7500 was released in 2014 and the short story is that a lot of people on a big airplane start disappearing after a guy named Lance Morrel (Rick Kelly) nearly bites his hand off trying to remove some salted peanuts from his throat. Lance appears from time to time and even tries to costar in the seat back video presentation of the Twilight Zone TV in-flight movie, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.”

After Lance dies despite getting expert chest compressions from the CPR Bran Martin (Ryan Kwanten) gives him gets moved to the upper-level cabin where Lance and William Shatner have a stimulating conversation about how well gremlins and Shinigami dolls get along.

One guy, Jake (Alex Frost) who likes to steal watches and cell phones swipes Lance’s wristwatch and becomes the first to disappear. OK, there are way too many passengers to keep track of in this film, so don’t blame me if I mix them up or even leave them out.

There are so many passengers struggling with their soap opera lives on this plane that they step on each other’s toes (just like on a real flight!) as they are competing over which one disappears next while they vie viciously for who wins The Snarkiest Award.

There’s this Goth lady Jacinta (Scout Taylor-Compton) in mom jeans who may turn out to be the most well-adjusted of the group as she and the Shinigami doll have a great time playing 7-card cribbage just before Raquel Mendoza (Christian Serratos) finds out she’s not pregnant and throws a tantrum when the tall flight attendant Liz Lewis (Nicky Whelan) fails to bring her any salted peanuts.

The rest of the passengers take turns trying to breathe with the oxygen masks which don’t work and Lance turns into a huge hand, lunging for everyone in sight if they don’t immediately obey orders and accept death when they’re supposed to.

I can’t say much more about this movie without spilling the Boston baked bean snacks, so I’ll just have to say I would give it a 4.5/5 shrilling chicken rating, mainly because Sena would give it a 5/5.