September Blog

This month was another long block of research, research, and more research. I swear, if next month doesn't change (which I know it will) I'll scream. I went through the rest of my digital files, looking for cases. I logged approximately 2,600 cases between this month and last month. I then organized the cases into the different categories that were relevant to my project. Some of the categories include various cryptids, Faeries, car troubles before and during the encounter, chases with or at the car, physical attacks from the cryptids and UFOs, electromagnetic effects on vehicles, haunted roads, phantom hitchhikers, spook lights, and road folklore. I also gave a lecture at the Mothman Festival in Point Pleasant, West Virginia on September 15th. There I worked a table where I sold copies of my book and discussed my research with other researchers and enthusiasts. I purchased several quite valuable books for my research concerning various haunted locations in different states in the midwest. My lecture went off extremely well at the event, and there were plenty of fantastic questions that helped with my research development. Finally, I did extensive research concerning highway hypnosis and if it could explain some of the road encounters. Highway hypnosis is an altered state of consciousness which is attributed to driving for extreme lengths of time. I felt this might explain some of the less complex cases I have collected. Unfortunately, there is no hallucination aspect of the hypnosis so the only thing that it explains is missing time cases with no other phenomenon.

I showed initiative this month by deciding to shift the focus of my project. I felt that I was overreaching with my original scope of the project. I don't think I could adequately assess car interaction cases and folklore and regular driving encounters without making the book woefully shallow or making the book 3,000 pages long. I decided to focus on the folklore behind many of these cases and discuss roads where the phenomena are common and that is what they are known for.

The highlight of my month was easily the Mothman Festival. This year was my fourth year attending and the second year speaking. I had a great time. I was surrounded by close friends, colleagues, and researchers many of whom I grew up learning from and watching on television. I received many fantastic insights concerning my project and just had such a great time overall.

I learned quite a bit of Crybaby Bridges because of one of the books I picked up at the Mothman Festival. I was titled Crybaby Bridges and was by my friend George Dudding. In it, George catalogs and discusses approximately 150 Crybaby Bridges around the country (about a third of which are here in Ohio). Crybaby Bridges are supposedly haunted bridges where an infant has died either due to motherly neglect or because of infanticide on the part of the mother. Many of the legends are rather brutal and dark. The bridges are all over and have become a fairly popular type of local urban legend, but there are some who claim to have actually encountered possible ghostly presences on the bridges. These could include infant apparitions, crying sounds from under the bridge, or even the shutting down of car engines. I had previously only had a passing knowledge of this phenomenon but I plan on including numerous cases of this in my book.

A challenge that I encountered this month had to do with what I should focus my book on. My original plan was to create a wide-ranging guide to various fortean road encounters, but this is not really feasible. There is simply too many cases and too many aspects to the phenomena for a single reasonably sized book to handle. So, after a long talk with my advisor Joshua Cutchin, I have decided to focus on "haunted roads" not just roads that are supposedly inhabited by ghosts and spirits, but also roads that are frequented by UFO visits and cryptid reports. This will have a focus on the folklore and history behind these roads and begin to ask why these roads and not others. I am happy about this because it allows me to explore some of my favorite aspects of the paranormal: phantom hitchhikers; cryptid habituation; spook lights, and folklore.

I am looking forward to doing more specific folkloric and historical research next month. I love doing that type of work over the more broad scope of my previous research for the month. I am really passionate about a lot of these topics and this avenue allows me to fully explore that.

The title slide of my lecture for the Mothman Festival. 

August Blog

This month for my research project was extremely boring and tedious. I spent the entire month digging through digital archives of various works I have access to, looking for anything and everything that might be relevant to my project. I logged those cases into a notebook -- denoting the type of case or information, where it came from, date if relevant, place if relevant, and page numbers -- and just kept going. Before this month I had logged a total of 1,520 cases. In the end, I had logged 2,448 cases at the time of writing. That's an increase of 928 cases or a 61% increase. I think I did a pretty good job. Most of the month was spent delving into Albert Rosales's wonderful Humanoid Database. Albert is a ufologist who was born in Cuba and later moved to Florida. He spent dozens of years collecting UFO reports and other strange stories that involve encounters with a humanoid entity. A few years ago, he had his entire database available online in the form of PDFs. I quickly snapped it up knowing that it would be infinitely useful. It certainly was. He organized the cases chronologically and had a different PDF for each year, and the database covered from 1850-2015. 165 years! I didn't finish going through his database because it became too time-consuming. I decided somewhere in the 1970s to move on to the various books and papers I was sent PDFs of from my advisor (thanks again Joshua!). I also looked for some other books and resources that I figured would be useful in PDF form. My month was boring but also very busy.

For what I have been doing, showing initiative isn't the easiest thing to do. Or at least extra initiative. I found a few websites that work like digital libraries which I've been using for resource searching so I don't have to bug Joshua all the time for certain leads. I guess that counts.

Probably the biggest highlight of this month was finding a PDF copy of an incredibly rare UFO book. The book is UFO Reports Involving Vehicle Interference by Mark Rodeghier. It was only published once and had a very limited print run. I was lucky that the organization that funded the book, the Center for UFO Studies, had a PDF copy available on the website because the book itself is easily worth over $300 and that is a little above my budget!

The biggest thing I learned was different styles for searching through databases and the internet. I know it was something that was touched upon on in my Freshman year of Bio-Med, but we never did anything in-depth concerning the different strategies. Instead, I ended up doing a lot of trial and error searches around various sites such as archives.org and other paranormally themed databases. I think it was good practice for my future and is definitely a good tool to have for the project itself. I also learned about a few interesting cases that are fairly well known that I was previously unfamiliar with. A good example of this was the infamous Soccoro, New Mexico UFO Landing. A police officer was in the middle of a high-speed chase when he saw the UFO land not to far away. He actually went to investigate and thus began an extremely complex and fascinating case that I am certainly including in my book.

I think the biggest challenge that I encountered during this month concerning my project was tackling the repetition and inherent dullness of this stage of the project. I enjoy researching when I can bounce around to different sources and compare and really dig into something interesting. I couldn't really do a lot of that this month and that made it infinitely harder to motivate myself to work. What I ended up doing was effectively shutting myself off from the world when it was time to work. I would put my headphones on with really loud music, make sure I was alone while working, make sure my phone and other devices were hidden, muted, and out of reach, and I turned off the internet for my computer so I couldn't just Google whatever popped into my head. It was difficult and stressed me out quite a bit, but it was worth it to get my work done.

The thing I am most looking forward to next month is finishing my wide dive into the literature and to begin to organize my thoughts and the information I have collected. Also next month, I will be speaking about the topic I am covering for my book at the Mothman Festival. I am planning on using the response I get from the presentation and the whole process of the presentation to affect how I organize and set up my outline for my book in November.

Here is a picture of the notebooks I've been working with. It's pretty repetitive work.