For decades before I was born, there were comic books about super heroes, people with powers far beyond normal human abilities, who saved mortal humans from evil villains. The underlying idea was that we can't handle shit on our own, some super being had to straighten stuff out. Those never interested me that much. But from the time I first remember Saturday morning cartoons, there was another group of young people, wandering around and solving mysteries. That's right, Scooby-Doo and gang from in the Mystery Machine. Generation X grew up with Scooby, Shaggy, Velma, Daphne, and Fred, who didn't need Superman, Batman, or Captain America. They figured stuff out on their own. Inspired by Scooby-Doo's posse, my generation was born to find mysteries, follow the leads, solve the mysteries, and then eat pizza. If that's not a cool life, I don't know what is.
Good or bad, Generation X was also born into the late Industrial Age, when conformity was all important, and we learned of the world mostly from mainstream newspapers, a few magazines, and three or four channels of TV. While there were plenty of cop dramas and murder mysteries on TV and in movies, and people exploring the mysteries of space at that time, the weird and historical mysteries didn't get much airtime, if any. But there were a few weird and unusual people, places, and events that popped up in our radar.
I grew up in Ohio, a state filled with farm country growing wheat, corn, and soybeans, mixed with industrial cities full of busy factories at that time. Most adults worked their factory or office jobs, and no one spent much time looking into odd facts, unusual historical places and people, and mysteries in my childhood world. But there were local stories, and books I'd pick up at garage sales about such things, every once in a while. If you talked openly about the possibility of UFO's, Sasquatch, or similar things, you were a weirdo back then.
The first cool weird thing I remember as a kid, was near where my grandparents lived in Wadsworth, Ohio. Wadsworth, is about 10-12 miles from Akron, home of Goodyear Tires, and about 35 miles straight south of Cleveland. Once in a while when I was a little kid, we'd take a drive around that area, and my dad, who grew up there, would point out "the giants house." This isn't one of the reported giants that researchers today, like Jim Viera, look for. The "giants' house" outside Seville, Ohio, was the home of a a real couple. My dad's dad, Bernal Emig, met this giant as a little boy. He was known as Captain Bates to the locals. Martin Van Buren Bates stood 7' 11", and he married Anna Swan, also 7' 11", and they became the tallest married couple in history, and still hold that record, to this day. They both traveled in circuses in their younger years, and later bought a farm in northern Ohio. Their farm house near Seville, Ohio had over sized doors, built to fit them, and was less than 5 miles from my grandparents' house in Wadsworth. When I was 7 or 8, we found a small book telling about their life, with drawings and photos of them. We drove by the Bates farm house quite a few times when I was little. Things like that fascinated me as a kid.
Another Ohio mystery that caught my attention as a kid, was the Great Serpent Mound. It was a huge, 4 or 5 foot high, more than 1,300 foot long "Indian mound." in southern Ohio, shaped like a snake eating an egg. Nobody knew exactly who made it, or why it was made. I tried to get my parents to take me to it, but we never made it there. As a school kid growing up in Ohio, we studied the Iroquois, and other native tribes from the region, but the Great Serpent Mound was the only mound we ever heard of in school in the 1970's. In the 40+ years since, it's become known that Ohio was a stronghold of the mound builders, and there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of ancient, earthen mounds, in Ohio. One of the biggest and most amazing mound complexes on earth, the Newark Earthworks, was about 35 miles from where my family lived in Coshocton, when I was in third grade. We had no idea something so amazing was a couple of cities away back then.
As my family moved around Ohio during my grade school years, I picked up a copy of Erich Von Daniken's 1968 book, Chariots of the Gods, which showed weird archeological finds from around the world, and the idea that aliens had something to do with all of these. I never read the whole book, and I still strongly doubt the "ancient aliens" idea, but I did read bits and pieces of the book. Things like the Antikythera "computer" got me intrigued. Who made these things? Why did they make them. How did they make them, when the technology didn't exist, as far a s we know.
I wasn't just interested in weird history as a kid, things like dinosaurs, Indians, and mainstream archeology fascinated me as well. I loved visiting Schoenbrunn village, a reconstructed pioneer town, in eastern Ohio. My family took us there several times as kids, and I went there on a couple of school field trips as well. Seeing how people lived in the 1700's and 1800's, in real log cabins, seemed cool as a kid. My friends and I always talked about building our own cabin in the woods when getting back from a trip to Schoenbrunn. Those plans ended quick, after moving 3 or 4 big branches, we realized how much work building a real cabin would be, and quickly gave up. Wherever my family moved to in Ohio, there was a patch of woods nearby, and from age 5 up, I was wandering around the local woods, as much as possible. I have always liked exploring, just wandering a new area, to see what's there, to see what I can find. I've been doing that, in one way or another, my whole life. This blog is taking that idea to the next level, and sharing stories of my own little adventures, and looking into weird places and mysteries I can do a little research on, and then share in a blog post.
About the same time, 1976-77, I picked up a weird story compilation book at a garage sale, for 25 cents, I think. In that book, I first heard of a supposed treasure that lay under an old oak tree, on Oak Island, off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada. I became an "acorn" as it's now called, an "Oak Island nut" (or enthusiast), from that point on. I love The Curse of Oak Island TV show, and, even while homeless the last three years, I've tried to catch as many episodes as possible. On last week's show (as I write this, January1, 2021), the coin with a square hole found on the Oak Island was shown to be an ancient Chinese coin, minted sometime between 400 BCE and 900 AD. That one little artifact changes North American history. One explanation is that a pirate, or other ship's crewman in the 1600's, had a 700 year old (or older) coin in their pocket, and dropped it on Oak Island. Or someone who was from, or had visited China, landed on that island, at least 100 years before Leif Erikson, and more and 600 years before Christopher Columbus sailed up to the Caribbean islands in 1492. Either way, it shakes up known North American history. Another amazing artifact leading to an even greater mystery to unravel.
In 1976, when I was 10-years-old, Mr. Spock himself, Leonard Nimoy, hosted the show In Search Of, which is when the mainstream media of the time, finally, started looking into many of the best known odd, historical, crypto-zoological, and paranormal mysteries of the world. There were a ton of people interested in Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, alien abduction stories, and other out-of-the-mainstream mysteries in the world in the 1970's. While none of these mysteries was solved on that show, the crew looked into all of these things in a solid and interesting way, for the time period. In Search Of , which ran for seven seasons, was a must watch for me as a kid.
Last night, chilling out alone on New Year's Eve 2020, I dozed off around 9:30 pm, and woke up again around 11:00 pm, when Expedition Unknown with Josh Gates was on. I love that show. Every weird adventure, Josh and his insane crew, travel wherever needed, and always break some new ground on each mystery, even if they don't completely solve it. Plus he's hilarious, which is cool, too. The show playing up to midnight last night was one I hadn't seen. It was about a man in Boston who thought he had found the location of one of the 12 treasures buried by Byron Preiss in 1982, who left the clues to find them in his book, The Secret.
I first heard of The Secret on Expedition Unknown while living in Richmond, Virginia in 2018, and have been intrigued by it ever since. In the show I saw last night, the man in Boston, with Josh Gates and the crew shooting video, found the the key in the third of the 12 treasures to be discovered. Before the Boston treasure, the previous two were found in Chicago and Cleveland, in 1983 and 2004. Nine of The Secret treasures are still waiting to be found. If you find one, you turn in the key in the treasure, and get a gemstone worth about $1,000 (in 1982). You also become part of a very elite treasure hunting club, one of the six people who have worked to find the three treasures so far. If you like visual and historical-based puzzles, check out The Secret.
So I rang in the year 2021 having just watched a show about real guy solving a treasure hunt, to find a real treasure. I started this blog, Steve Emig Adventuring, back in June, 2020, when my old blog hit 100,000 page views. I started this blog to head in a new direction, and to starting looking into a lot of these historical mysteries, interesting locations, and weird things in our world. We're technically still in lockdown mode here in Los Angeles county right now, but there's a lot I can do in the blog right now, without actually traveling much. As we work past the horrible pandemic we're all dealing with right now, I plan to look at a whole bunch of these interesting locations, and weird mysteries, compile info, and share them with all of you. So that's my idea with this blog, and it's time to really get the idea going.
2020 is out the door. 2021 is here, let's go explore!
No comments:
Post a Comment