Secondly, if you don’t know who they are, Brian Blessed is a formidable English Shakespearean actor and adventurer, and Terry Wogan is a charming Irish comedian and TV/radio host.

Brian Blessed (L) ... and ... Terry Wogan (R)

Blessed dominates the early betting. In the lead-up to the fight, he has several high-profile supporters, which help assure him massive popular backing, eventually surging to 3-2 on. Wogan, by contrast, barely manages to scrape up to 5-1. It doesn’t seem to dent Wogan’s morale any, though.

As proceedings start, the two men square off. Blessed is grinning from ear to ear like a bull gorilla on crack, letting out regular bellows as he psychs himself up into a slaying mood. Wogan, by contrast, looks even smaller and more frail than usual. He’s got a little glint in his eye though, and you can see people wondering if the charming Irishman has something up his sleeve.

The bell goes, and Blessed leaps forward with a mighty “Yaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”. He’s swinging even before he lands, a wild haymaker that forces Wogan to back up immediately. Blessed uses his momentum to pull himself forward at a swift stumble, relying on mass to overpower his enemy. Wogan totters back, and then grunts as Blessed’s head smacks into his chest. Wogan twists slightly as the headbutt lands, deflecting the worst of the impact, but he’s unbalanced as Blessed’s shoulder smashes him. The two men stagger apart, Wogan grim, Blessed wild and fierce.

Wogan dances back a couple of steps as Blessed makes a beeline for him. At the very last instant, he sways aside, groaning with the effort, and slides his leg forward. Blessed trips over it and falls. Wogan grins, but Blessed is already moving, pulling his legs underneath himself to get back standing. He looks angry, his hands balling into fists.

As Blessed lurches back to his feet, Wogan backs up, looking slightly nervous. His hands half-raise, placatory. Blessed growls, a long, low sound. He shifts his weight, and then springs forward, crazy beard flying. Wogan reaches out to meet his charge, and then, just as they close, he pushes himself away from the bigger man, falling backwards. Blessed grins ferociously, but Wogan is slipping beneath him.

Suddenly Blessed screams, a horrible, tortured noise. Wogan has bit straight into his bollocks, so hard they’re almost squashed flat. Blessed rears, flailing and shrieking, but Wogan is reaching round. There’s an odd gleam, and then suddenlly blood gouts. Blessed screeches, and tries to reach behind himself, but sheets of blood are gushing from his ripped-out asshole. Wogan rolls clear, a horrible grin on his face, the previously-concealed knife plainly visible now. Blessed sags, weakening quickly, and Wogan steps up to him, lays a gore-soaked hand on his shoulder, smiles pleasantly and stabs his shiv through the luvvy’s neck.

With one last, horrid gurgle, Brian Blessed collapses. The Irish Assassin twinkles to the crowd, bows, and walks off to claim his prize.

In the British TV movie created to explain the character’s back-story, “Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into the Future”, it was revealed that the reporter, Edison Carter, had been on a crusade to expose a new form of compressed advertising — the ‘blipvert’ — as a lethal danger. Whilst trying to escape a TV network office on a motorbike, Carter had smashed his head into a height clearance sign. When his brain was imaged, this trauma was what led to his digital echo’s assumption of the Max Headroom personality. Max was discarded as irredemably faulty, but went on to host his own surreal award-winning show. When Edison Carter recovered meanwhile, he was able to use the furore Max had caused to bring blipverts to the world’s attention. A later US spin-off sci-fi series kept the same premise as the film, adding different abuses for Carter to uncover each week. In addition to these outings, Max also appeared advertising assorted products, from New Coke to Channel 4, and was even interviewed by David Letterman.

Matt Frewer as Max Headroom

Max Headroom’s popularity had peaked and was on the decline by November ’87 when the now-infamous Max Headroom Broadcast Signal Intrusion took place. On the night of the 22nd, Chicago viewers were treated to a peculiar interruption in the middle of a WGN news report on the Cubs — thirty seconds of silent broadcast of a strange guy in a Max Headroom mask. That would have been odd enough, but later in the evening, the pirate signal-hacker struck again.

The second time, he hacked into WTTW, a PBS station. This time, he managed to get sound, and was able to complete a 90-second broadcast of the tape over an episode of the Doctor Who story The Horror of Fang Rock. WTTW’s engineers didn’t have time to work out a way of overriding the pirate signal. The whole thing was captured by bemused Doctor Who fans.

Despite best efforts, the hacker was never caught. Which means that somewhere, this person is still out there…

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWdgAMYjYSs

Scary.

(Thanks to Cracked for reminding me about this madness!)

One of the advances that’s been most persistently twenty years away for decades and decades now is artificial intelligence. There have been a few modestly encouraging achievements — neural networks, expert systems, and so on — but in reality, software experts have been totally unable to even begin trying to program an intelligent piece of software. Rumours abound regarding the sentience of Echelon II/Magistrand, the English-speaking world’s massive spy computer — the one that scans every electronic communication — but they’re just not plausible. It would be easier to believe that a sentient Magistrand was a gift from aliens than that we’d programmed a real AI.

The main trouble is that the human brain is just too complex. We don’t really know how it works yet, and there’s even uncertainty regarding the function of different areas. If we can’t even understand consciousness, how can we hope to program it?

Henry Markram: Would you buy a shark-mounted laser doomsday device from this man?

Professor Henry Markram is a South-African Israeli genius, a doctor turned computer engineer, has announced that he expects to have a working electronic simulation of a human brain by 2018. Just eight years. His approach is refreshingly direct. Rather than try to work out how each different brain function works and program flexible simulations, he plans to use dissection and examination. His goal is to map all of the physical elements that make up a human brain, and then reproduce a duplicate structure inside a computer.

The work is intricate and painstaking, but none the less achievable. He has already reproduced — simulated? uploaded? — a mouse’s neocortical column. It’s just computer power stopping him from producing an entire mouse-brain, or starting work on recreating a human brain. Markram is based in Switzerland, and is getting huge amounts of funding for his Blue Brain. As the name suggests, IBM are providing a lot of help and support, too. Given the ever-increasing power of the computing industry, he expects to have sufficient computer power in the next few years.

The result, of course, remains unpredictable. We don’t even really know how memory is encoded, so it’s difficult to guess how the Blue Brain will manifest. But his simulated chunk of rat-brain has occasionally produced totally unexpected bursts of brainwaves over the last year. Some scientists have predicted that the Blue Brain will be an ‘empty bucket’, nothing more than a clever model; others have pointed out that humans start out as fairly blank slates too. Regardless, Markram relishes the issues that his work will raise:

“The process of building this is going to change society. We will have ethical problems that are unimaginable to us”

My pick for the outright strangest find of 2009 has to go to Craig Hogan, the director of Fermilab’s Center for Particle Astrophysics. As reported by New Scientist magazine back in January, he has found evidence to suggest that the entire universe and everything in it might be nothing more than a holographic projection.

To quote from one the article’s less technical bits:

The holograms you find on credit cards and banknotes are etched on two-dimensional plastic films. When light bounces off them, it recreates the appearance of a 3D image. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard ‘t Hooft suggested that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole. Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.

The “holographic principle” challenges our sensibilities. It seems hard to believe that you woke up, brushed your teeth and are reading this article because of something happening on the boundary of the universe. No one knows what it would mean for us if we really do live in a hologram, yet theorists have good reasons to believe that many aspects of the holographic principle are true.

- New Scientist #2691

The idea is simply mind-boggling, and makes all of those late-night “What if we’re really just living in a computer simulation” conversations seem lazy and timid, frankly. What’s more disconcerting is that the world of physics appears to have greeted Hogan’s findings quite cheerfully. The implication, according to NS at least, is that this theory would in fact help a lot of other things make sense.

Hogan’s findings are related to an ongoing problem of unexpected static in a large German detector, the GEO600, designed to attempt to find evidence of gravity waves. The static appears to match the sort of distortion you would expect to find if you were looking really closely at the fundamental limit of space-time — the point where smooth reality breaks down into individual dots, in the same way a computer image breaks down into pixels if you use a big magnifying glass.

GEO600

We already know from work on black holes that a flat 2-D plane (the black hole’s event horizon) can hold all the information about a 3-D environment (the original star that became the black hole). The universe has a similar boundary, stemming from its time of creation. Similarly, we’ve also known for some time that the universe would break down into turbulence when we managed to look closely enough. This limit is the Planck Length, 10^-35 metres. The Planck Length is far, far tinier than anything we can hope to detect however, so it had been assumed that we would never detect that fundamental turbulence.

That is where Hogan came in. If the universe was holographic, with its ‘reality’ on the outside shell, the information inside would break down long before the Planck Length.

Think about a hollow egg. Now consider filling it with sand versus coating it with sand. It’s obvious that you can fit far more sand inside. The only way to get the same number of grains both covering the outside and filling the inside is to use much bigger grains on the inside. The same principle applies to the holographic principle. To quote Hogan himself, “A holographic universe is blurry … if you lived inside a hologram, you could tell by the blurring.”

Hogan calculated that if we lived in a holographic universe, we could expect to see reality starting to break down into static at 10^-16 metres. That’s within the detection range of several devices we already have, including the GEO600. He got in touch with the GEO600 team, and discovered that they were experiencing static that they couldn’t explain, that matched his calculations. “It looked exactly the same as my predictions,” he said.

It’s too early to claim anything definitive. Even Hogan himself cheerfully agrees that the static could come from some so-far unexplained source. Further experiments will need to be done, ones that look more specifically for holographic noise. But if it does turn out to be evidence of a holographic universe, “We would,” Hogan says, “have directly observed the quantum of time … Ultimately, we may have our first indication of how space-time emerges out of quantum theory.”

If you fancy some more enigmatic New Scientist mysteries, why not have a look at 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense, 13 More Things That Don’t Make Sense, and 10 Things We Don’t Understand About Humans.

Some book titles manage to perfectly encapsulate the spirit of the novel they grace. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a great example of a high-concept title carrying the rest of the book along with it. Odd as it may seem, Shatnerquake is another.

It’s the near future, and William Shatner is reluctantly attending the world’s largest Shatner fan convention, ShatnerCon. Unfortunately for Bill, a cult of crazed Campbellian assassins has infiltrated the convention, determined to use surreal technology to wipe him out of all TV history. The device goes off, but rather than deleting Shatner’s TV personas as it is supposed to, it forces them all into reality. Captain Kirk, TJ Hooker, Denny Crane and more all find themselves catapulted out of their shows and into everyday life. Driven instantly mad by the horrifying awareness that they are nothing more than fragmentary shadows, they are all filled with the same wild urge — to usurp the real Bill Shatner’s place in reality. The hunt begins, and it will take all of Shatner’s hard-won Drunken Kung Fu skills if he’s to stand any chance of surviving the Con…

Yes, Shatnerquake is utterly insane. It’s also faced-paced, viciously bloody, barbed, dark, and very entertaining.

It’s free to download today — Nov 17th — so what the hell have you got to lose? Go grab Shatnerquake. I guarantee you will never read anything else like it.

Exoriare — it’s Latin for ‘Rise up’ — is a graphic novel written by Rushkoff that is being put out on line in meaty chunks. The art is fascinating, and the story is dense with enigmas and hints. It seems as if it might be part of a teaser campaign for a computer game (slated for 2011?)… But it is more than just another webcomic. It is, quite literally, a gateway.

Exoriare

The Exoriare graphic novel makes it clear that something strange is going on at NASA and in the US military. A grass-roots movement is trying to investigate, and organise itself into a covert communications network, the Darknet. Mystical powers may possibly be stirring, too.

There is also a link hidden within the graphic novel. Follow it, and it will take you straight into a net-based Alternate Reality Game. The first challenge will be on familiar footing if you played computer games in the 80s, but find your way through, and you gain access to the Darknet itself…

Go explore Exoriare. Even if you just read the graphic novel, it’s still well worth it. But if you find your way in deeper, be prepared for one hell of a ride.

Pick twenty-four people at random from the phone book or, if your phone book doesn’t have addresses in, pick twenty-four addresses randomly from your town. Select a superpower, fighting skill, or other competitive talent for each person, and divide them up into four groups of six.

Then prepare a simple letter to each person explaining that their alter-ego has been selected for entry into ‘The Game’, and post the letters. Compare the abilities of each of the six in each group, and either decide the top two winners straight out, or play them off against each other. At the end of the week, inform the winners that they have gone through to the next round, and commiserate the losers. Remember to thank them for playing. To make it more interesting, tell each person about some of the contests they fought, and why they won or lost.

Raven Lost The Game, by Scragz

If you have the patience –- and the money for stamps –- you could just do one match-up a week at the group stage, letting people know how they are doing in the table.

After the group qualifiers, you’ll have eight quarter-­finalists left. Again, wait a week, and then pair them up, choose victors, and let the contestants know. Wait another week for the semis, and then one last week for the final. If you are feeling generous, you might like to send the winner a small prize, like a book token or a certificate.

What ever you do, under no circumstances explain anything to the contestants or provide any details about yourself. The fun of the game lies in the complete mystery of the situation.

If you live in the USA or somewhere else where suing people is a religion, then you’ll need to take extra precautions. Make it very clear on every letter that this is just a game, that all activity is entirely fictitious, and it has no implications or inferences for real life. You can also use a laser printer to print the letters and envelopes. If you’re feeling really paranoid, use a different mail box each week to post your letters, wear rubber gloves to handle them, and wet the backs of the stamps with a sponge rather than licking them.

The most golden rule of the game though is never, ever write anything threatening to the recipients –- that really can get you arrested. So when you describe contests, make sure that it is perfectly clear that you are talking about their alter ego, not themselves. When someone gets knocked out, do not even describe their character as being killed or injured, just as having lost.

Although you’ll probably never get to see your victims’ utter confusion first hand -– unless you select friends and acquaintances to play –- you’ll have the deep satisfaction of knowing that you’ve left twenty-four perfectly ordinary people scratching their heads and talking about your actions for years to come.

Argleton, Lancs, UK

Argleton in Lancashire, England may be the most enigmatic town on the face of the planet. On the face of it, there’s nothing particularly odd about the place. You’ll easily find Argleton property sites, local memorabilia, and more. At least, you could until a couple of days ago, when the links got deluged.

The thing is, Argleton doesn’t exist.

There is no Argleton, and never has been. The spot Google Maps identifies is just strips of woodland and fields. The nearest proper place is a village called Aughton, as you can clearly see on the map above. One local chap, Mr. Roy, went on a fascinating little tour of the place back in February.

Argleton by and (c) Mr. Roy.

No-one seems to be able to explain what the hell Argleton is doing there. The most common guess is that the town was added into a map database as a false flag location to help detect theft — it’s commonly done, but usually with minor non-existent streets. The fact that it’s an anagram of ‘Not Large’ seems to add weight to this hypothesis. No-one anywhere in the map chain appears to be able to confirm it, however.

Other people suggest that it’s a corruption of Aughton’s name, but Aughton is there too, and waters are being further muddied by a number of American sites that seem to think that Argleton is actually in Pennsylvania.

As psychogeographers and urban shamans will tell you, there’s a power in place names, and particularly in sites which are off the map — or, in this case, off the territory. Could Argleton be some sort of epic ritual, designed to bring something imaginary to life? I’d like to imagine that was behind the mystery.

Still, if you want to get to Argleton yourself, you’d better hurry. The Apocalypse is coming for the unfortunate, sleepy Lancashire un-town. Telesync, the company concerned, have said they’ll remove it from their databases, and presumably have already done so. It’s only a matter of time before Argleton’s strange virtual life falls crashing into the void.

Huge Weaving as Alan Moore's V, complete with Guy Fawkes mask.

Unrelated Note: As it’s November 5th, I was going to do a post about Guy Fawkes Night, Britain’s annual fireworks festival commemorating a chap who tried his best to blow up parliament. We’re supposed to be celebrating the fact he failed, but nowadays, many people seem to be celebrating the fact he tried. But really, other people have done it better, and for me, V for Vendetta says it all:

I do, like many of you, appreciate the comforts of the everyday routine, the security of the familiar, the tranquility of repetition. I enjoy them as much as any bloke. But in the spirit of commemoration – whereby those important events of the past, usually associated with someone’s death or the end of some awful bloody struggle, are celebrated with a nice holiday – I thought we could mark this November the fifth, a day that is sadly no longer remembered, by taking some time out of our daily lives to sit down and have a little chat.There are, of course, those who do not want us to speak. I suspect even now orders are being shouted into telephones and men with guns will soon be on their way. Why? Because while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn’t there?

Cruelty and injustice…intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance, coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who’s to blame? Well certainly there are those who are more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable. But again, truth be told…if you’re looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror.

The Comte de Saint Germain, c 1784.

Despite being one of the most influential characters in modern history, the Count de St. Germain is also one of the most enigmatic. Karl, Prince of Hesse described him as one of the “greatest philosophers who ever lived – the friend of humanity, whose heart was concerned only with the happiness of others.” Despite a horde of such accolades from nobility right across Europe, nothing whatsoever is known of St. Germain’s early life – not even when or where it started.

The Count de St. Germain is remembered as a man of medium height, approximately 45 years old, with a slim figure, graceful bearing, a radiant smile and astonishingly lovely eyes. He was amazingly skilled in just about every area that it was possible to be skilled in. He spoke French, German, English, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Danish, Swedish, Arabic and Chinese fluently, without any trace of an accent. He played most musical instruments – Frederick the Great commended his skill with the Harpsichord – but his favourite was the violin. Paganini himself is known to have declared St. Germain his equal with the instrument. Two works that the Count composed are in the British Museum, whilst others were given to Tchaikovsky and Prince Ferdinand, amongst others.

St. Germain had more talents that the musical, though. His paintings were said to be reminiscent of Raphael and quite extraordinary in quality, particularly for his ability to perfectly render the shine of a gemstone on canvas; he was sought after as an art critic and as a verifier of paintings. His memory was so great that he could glance at a paper and then repeat it word for word days later, and he could write poetry with one hand whilst simultaneously drafting political missives with the other. His chief peculiarity was never eating or drinking with others, instead subsisting on a form of oat gruel he prepared himself, and drinking little other than a tea he personally brewed from dried herbs.

But his feats were greater than mere skill and quickness of mind can allow for. St. Germain was regularly said to be able to answer questions before they were spoken, and to know the content of letters before opening them. Casanova recorded that he visited St. Germain in his laboratory and handed the Count a silver coin which was returned, moments later – now made of solid gold. St. Germain also claimed to know how to melt small diamonds into larger single stones, and astonished the French Ambassador to Holland by smashing a huge diamond to pieces with a hammer – the twin of a stone he had just sold to a dealer for a princely sum. On another occasion, he amazed King Louis XV by melting a flaw out of one of his larger diamonds, increasing the value of the stone by a huge amount.

St. Germain claimed to have lived in ancient Chaldea, and to possess secrets of the Egyptian masters. He commonly spoke about times long past as if he himself had been there to witness them, right down to exacting details. One evening, while telling a story to some guests about an event that had happened many hundreds of years earlier, he nodded over to his butler and asked the man if he had left out anything important. The butler chided him gently: “Monsieur le Comte forgets that I have been with him only five hundred years. I could not, therefore, have been present at that occurrence. It must have been my predecessor.”

If the Count’s origin, birth, nationality and age remain matters of mystery, his presence in Europe through the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries is a matter of record. He first surfaced in Venice in 1710, where he met many people, including Rameau and the Countess de Georgy. The Countess met him again fifty years later, at a party thrown by Madame Pompadour, and asked him if his father had been in Venice in that year. The Count demurred. “No, Madame, but I myself was living in Venice at the end of the last century and the beginning of this. I had the honour of paying you court in 1710, and you were kind enough to admire a little music of my composition.” The Countess, shocked, declared that had indeed been the case, which meant that St. Germain had to be at least a century old. St. Germain just smiled.

All through the Eighteenth century, St. Germain left little ripples of amazement across the nobility of Europe. Every time, the descriptions of his appearance, talents and age remained the same. In 1723, the Countess de Genlis saw a portrait of St. Germain’s mother, but did not recognise the style of her clothes, and could not get the secretive count to comment. From 1737 to 1742, records show that he lived with the Shah of Persia and spent his time in alchemical research. When he returned, he spent a year in Versailles with Louis XV, and then got involved in the Jacobite Revolution in England. Once that was settled, he headed to spend time with Frederick the Great in Potsdam. He met Voltaire while he was there, and greatly impressed the man; Voltaire wrote to Frederick that in his opinion, “the Count de St. Germain is a man who was never born, who will never die, and who knows everything.”

The Comte de Saint Germain c. 1745

1755 saw St. Germain accompanying General Clive to India. A couple of years later, he was back in France, where Louis XV gave him a suite and laboratory in his royal chateau Chambord, in Touraine. In 1760, Louis sent St. Germain to Holland and England on a very delicate diplomatic mission, and it is thanks to his efforts that the historical Family Compact was signed between England and France, which led directly to the Treaty of Paris, and the end of the colonial wars. In 1761, St. Germain was in St. Petersburg in Russia, helping to put Catherine the Great upon the throne. He left the country as a full Imperial General of the Russian armies, and shortly afterwards was placed in Tunis with the Russian fleet, still in uniform, using the title of Graf Saltikoff. Other honours and titles he claimed or was awarded during his adventures included being named Marquis de Montferrat, Comte Bellamarre, Chevalier Schoening, Chevalier Weldon, Graf Tzarogy, and Prinz Ragoczy.

After Louis XV died in 1774, St. Germain spent several years in Austria and Germany, apparently introducing Theosophical notions into the occult and mystic organisations of the day – including the Rosicrucian Society in Vienna, the Knights Templar, the Fratres Lucis, and the Knights and Brothers of Asia. He was a delegate to the Freemason’s Wilhelmsbad Conference in 1782.

The Count de St. Germain officially died on February 27 1784, during chemical experiments in Eckernförde, near Schleswig in Denmark. There was no body, but his good friend, Karl, Prince of Hesse, attested to his death, and his death certificate can be found in the Eckernförde Church Register.

If he did die in Schleswig, it doesn’t seem to have slowed him down much. St. Germain is recorded as attending the great Masonic Paris Convention of 1785. He is then said to have had a very important interview with the Empress of Russia in 1786. After that, he went back to France in a last-ditch – unsuccessful – effort to help stave off the revolution.

The Comte de St. Germain, far right, with Helena Blavatsky

The Countess d’Adhémar was one of French queen Marie-Antoinette’s ladies-in-waiting, and she kept extensive diaries of the period. St. Germain features several times. In 1788, St. Germain came to visit the Countess d’Adhémar, warned her that a conspiracy to overthrow the monarchy was underfoot, and asked her to take him to see the Queen. The countess reported the visit, and discovered that the Queen had received warnings herself. A meeting was arranged, and St. Germain asked the Queen to set up a meeting with the King – and to encourage him not to mention it to his minister, Maurepas. But the King ignored the warning, and called Maurepas for advice. The minister immediately went to see the Countess d’Adhémar. St. Germain appeared in the middle of the conversation, and informed Maurepas that his petty jealousy was about to destroy the French monarchy, because he didn’t have enough time to devote to saving it.

In 1789, having seemingly had to give up, St. Germain wrote to Queen Marie-Antoinette on July 14th, warning her that her friend the Duchesse de Polignac – who was visiting her – and all of that line and their friends were doomed to death. On October 5, Countess d’Adhémar got a letter saying that the sun had set on the French monarchy, and it was too late; his hands were tied “by one stronger than myself”. He prophesied the death of Marie Antoinette, the ruin of the royal family, and the rise of Napoleon. He himself would be going to Sweden to investigate King Gustavius III and to try to head off “a great crime.” He added that the Countess d’Adhémar would have sight of him five more times, but not to look forward to the sixth.

In 1790, St. Germain admitted his immediate plans to an Austrian friend, Franz Graeffer.

“Tomorrow night I am off. I am much needed in Constantinople, then in England, there to prepare two new inventions which you will have in the next century — trains and steamboats. Toward the end of this century I shall disappear out of Europe,  and betake myself to the region of the Himalayas. I will rest; I must rest.”

The Countess d’Adhémar recorded five further occasions on which she saw the Count – fleeting visitations in 1799, 1802, 1804, 1813 and 1820. It is presumed that he also appeared to her on the day of her death, in 1822. A mysterious Englishman named Major Fraser appeared in Parisian society at the same time, with many of the same characteristics of the Count de St. Germain, and of a similar age and breadth of skill. A Frenchman who had know St. Germain, Albert Vandam, wrote in his memoirs about the striking similarity between Fraser and St. Germain. Was this the same Major Fraser who, in 1820, published an account of his journeys in the Himalayas, in which he said he had reached Gangotri, the source of the most sacred branch of the Ganges River, and bathed in the spring of the Jumna River? No-one knows, because Major Fraser vanished as suddenly as St. Germain himself had done.

There are further rumours that he also appeared to Lord Lytton in 1860 – and there is a famous photograph from ten years after that, 1885, that purports to show the Count de St. Germain standing next to Madame Helena Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical movement. As late as 1897, the French singer Emma Calve dedicated an autographed portrait of herself to St. Germain. Some rumours have attempted to suggest that he played the role of Russian healer and mystic Rasputin, before slipping off to America. Most recently, he is said to have set up in Paris, under yet another assumed name and nationality, still engaged in utterly mysterious purposes.

This happened to me when I was fifteen years old, the spring before I left home for good. I grew up in Maine.  For those of you who think a trip to the Cascades is getting back to nature, Maine is the forest primeval.  There’s a reason Stephen King includes all those deep, dark, haunted forests in his books  (the town which became his model for ‘Salem’s Lot lay about 20 miles from my front door, as the crow flies;  the “Pet Semetary” was disturbingly close by).

Albion, Maine

Albion was the name of my home town, founded in 1754.  It’s only claim to fame is as the birthplace of Elijah Lovejoy, the first recorded American martyr for the press.  The inhabitants had long since forgotten the significance of the town’s namesake and had allowed the burg to fade into the kind of decaying, vapid decrepitude one expects from such tiny, isolated hamlets.  It was part H.P. Lovecraft and part “‘Salem’s Lot,” without the literary references and artistic punch of either. There were more cows than people in Albion, its economy based almost entirely on milk production.  Those few who were not dairy farmers comprised the tiny merchant class, the even tinier landed gentry and the backwoods homesteaders.

Most people think New England has four seasons, but Maine actually has two:  Winter and Several Weeks of Very Chilly Weather.  There is also a subseason, known to most locals as “Mud.”

Once, during the first week of Mud, some high school friends and I went off into the aforementioned forest primeval, engaged in our primary occupation:  Avoiding School.  We left town by way of an old logging trail that ran behind the general store (“H.L. Keay & Son, since 1850:  If we don’t have it, you don’t need it!”) and cut across thawing farmland and thickets until we reached the edge of Fowler’s Bog.  This was a vast expanse of dense marshland which stretched from Albion to the Unity town line, eight miles away.  In the winter, when the bog was frozen, you could walk, ski or snowmobile across its surface safely, but for the rest of the year it was as treacherous a piece of ground as you could wish.

We skirted the edge of the bog for several miles, admiring the first signs of spring (or Very Chilly Weather) in the forest around us. Finally, we reached our destination, an old, tumbledown hunting cabin along the edge of the bog, its boards weathered and gray in stark contrast to the emerging greenery of the woods. We remained there for several hours as the sun made its way quickly across the sky, talking, joking and speculating on the quality of existence outside Albion and Maine.  Dark came early at that time of year, and before too long the shadows were lengthening rapidly as the sun began to slide down behind the trees.

Albion Woods

Now, we’d literally grown up in those woods and knew them very well: Fowler’s Bog and the surrounding forest held no secrets for us.  More than once we’d navigated our way home well after dark without so much as a stubbed toe. But not this time. Somehow, our little group became separated.  Maybe the others left us behind intentionally, maybe we just weren’t paying attention for once, I don’t know.  But it was nearly full dark when my friend Matt and I realized the others were not to be seen.

We laughed about it, thinking they’d either gone ahead to lay in ambush and scare us as we made our way through the dark woods, or they’d taken a wrong turning somewhere up ahead and would no doubt catch us up later.  So we continued apace, talking and laughing, until Matt stopped and jerked his head up and asked “What the hell is that?!??”

I looked to where he pointed. I have seen bears, moose, wolves, coyotes, porcupines, foxes, deer, raccoons, coyotes and bobcats, all in their natural habitats. I have seen some weird things in those woods, things I cannot to this day adequately explain. This was one of them.  I can still recall the unfamiliar feeling of abject terror;  it was the first and only time in my life I’ve ever been utterly helpless with fear.

It was quite big.  It was very, very black.  And it made the most terrifying sound I have ever heard in my life as it made its way through the underbrush not twenty feet away from where we stood.  We didn’t see it clearly, thanks to the darkness and intervening foliage.  It crossed our path and went down into the bog, still making that noise.  Then we heard a muffled “splash;”  later we agreed it must have plunged into the bog at a deep spot.

I never told my parents, but Matt told his and, being members of the landed gentry, they called the local sheriff who took us out there a couple of days later. Matt’s parents came with us.  We found the place easily enough, and there was plenty of evidence of the thing’s passage: A swath of crushed forest underbrush crossed from the treeline down to the bog. Had we wished to, we could have easily followed it back into the forest. But the sheriff said it was a trail left by a couple of big bears and said we were lucky not to have been charged or even mauled.

Matt’s parents looked at the sheriff as though he’d just told them he was a space alien and would we mind joining him on Mars for tea?  Matt’s father called the sheriff every conceivable kind of ass, pointing out what we all knew: No bear or anything else we’d ever seen made that trail. But the sheriff just stood there calmly and took the verbal abuse, and after Matt’s father had finished he quietly said the matter was closed and asked us not to make too much of it.

That was the very last time my friends and I ever went near Fowler’s Bog.

For the record, yes, the phrase ‘Bigfoot encounter’ has crossed my mind. I wouldn’t call myself a believer in the Big Hairy, but I keep an open mind. I don’t want to put words into Jason’s mouth, though. It could well have been a shoggoth, after all…