Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World

Cox died in 1971, but the squid version got its biggest audience nine years later from his friend John Cloudsley-Thompson, a zoologist and fellow World War II Army veteran who'd seen Cox's scars.

In an episode of Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World that aired on September 9th, 1980, Cloudsley-Thompson shared the story as Cox had told it to him.

Well, when I looked at his leg, he pulled up his trousers, and I could see scars the size of a penny, which is about an inch and a quarter, the old penny, were, were dotted at intervals all the way up his leg.

And these were white scars sunk quite deep into the flesh where the skin had been pulled off.

And what he found shocked him.

Long cuts torn through the protective rubber coating and embedded in many of those cuts were pieces of something that looked like claws.

In the episode of Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World that aired on September 9th, 1980, Carpenter is on record describing what they found.

We noticed that there were some, some, uh, quite long scratches Starting from the, uh, front and the side and down underneath the dome itself.

So this is the history of things that people like to forget, the occult, magic, alchemy, Kabbalah.

And I really got interested in it mostly because I grew up watching a lot of shows like Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World and In Search of Leonard Nimoy.

And those are shows that really frame the world as a pretty strange and mysterious place filled with monsters and ghosts and Atlantis and UFOs and all of that.

And when I as I grew older, I continued to be really interested in that kind of material, but also developed a pretty critical thinking and skeptical eye.

So could you just explain to the people how you came to love this sort of facet of academia and what draws you into this?

So I think like a lot of kids in the '80s, I grew up with, uh, Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World and Leonard Nimoy's In Search Of, and like horror movies like Evil Dead with the Necronomicon summoning demons.

And so I grew up in a world of like H.P. Lovecraft stories and playing Dungeons & Dragons, and I got so interested in that kind of material, Atlantis and ghosts and, uh, you know, Bigfoot and grimoires and, you know, all this sort of thing.

And I think that there's kind of two paths that happen to most people, right? Either you sort of grow up and everything becomes disenchanted and, and frankly boring, and you lose interest in all that and, you know, it's just all my- it's all mythology.

We're going to bring them all together.

I think it's Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World, if anyone remembers that series from the 70s.

The book that came out has a photo of the Mitchell Hedges skull surrounded by 12 other crystal skulls, and the bottom left one is him.

So there's...

And so I sort of expanded it into real world strange stories.

So it's a bit like, I don't know if you remember Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World.

Well, this, this was this man that used to go around looking at the world's mysteries.

Okay.

If you're wondering, yes, that is Mike Mitchell Hedges, the fellow associated with the so-called Crystal Skull of Louboutin, the last city in Central America.

almost everything you think you know about that story actually came from his daughter who inherited the skull and travelled around mostly Ontario I think I think she was Ontario where she lived she ended up living and used to take it into schools and show it to school children there are lots of people alive who still remember this and of course very famously she took it on to get tested and was on Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World with it where it became the kind of unofficial symbol for that show itself and uh however almost everything you think you know about it very little of that came from mike mitchell hedges himself although he was a famous adventurer and i would say a bit of a bullshitter as well and a very interesting character in his own right and i would like to do an episode on his writing and on the legend of the crystal skull being as it has a kind of a jungle you know 1930s jungle adventure flavor even if it isn't an out and out lost world but i do think that it has strong connections to the literature anyway there's a book that a now i remember several years ago coming across an article about arthur conan doyle's son adrian conan doyle and his friendship with mike mitchell hedges and an expedition that they um it i at first i thought right they're interested in sea monsters that's that's pretty cool but i i what they probably were referring to was big fish because another thing that mike mitchell hedges was known for as as you might guess from that that reference i just read in the maricot deep he was known for telling stories about going looking for and catching giant fish So Adrian Conan Doyle wrote a book called Heaven Has Claws.

It's a gorgeous cover actually with a kind of a manta ray floating past, a ghostly white manta ray floating past a small boat in a tropical scene.

And the description is East African Adventure and Big Game Fishing with Adrian Conan Doyle, son of Arthur Conan Doyle.

I'm going to start embracing this, trying to learn more about this ability that I have and learning how to turn it on, how to turn it off and how it works.

And really, from the beginning, having accepting parents and accepting family that embraced the paranormal, giving me that outlet to read about it, to find these documentaries like Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World in search of, you know, sightings.

That was another huge show that was great at the early 1990s.

And then just going full throttle when I got into high school saying, I want to study with mediums.

So if one plane shoot down another plane, keep in mind this is way before the days of computers, that was all done in his head in the minute, you know, to actually be able to shoot down other planes, and he did that.

Uh, but, uh, Remy, uh, recounted in 1959, so he did an episode from Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World entitled Dragons, Dinosaurs, and Giant Snakes.

Remy recounted in 1959 he had encountered a giant snake in the r- in the Belgian Congo, returning from the Kamine Air Force Base from a mission by helicopter.

He reported having to turn around and made several passes over the snake to allow other piece, or persons on the board to photograph the creature.

Professor Roy Mackle, who was a biologist and a cryptozoologist from the University of Chicago.

The two men appeared on Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World in 1980 before they left to go to Lake Tele and reported that natives knew about a living, breathing diplodocus or diplodocus that lived in the deep water areas of the Congo.

Now, we don't have to watch this right now.

I'm going to put a clip to an interview for their segment on...