Speaker 1: Now Here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: And welcome back to Coast to Coast, George Nori with you.
Speaker 2: Mark Hartzman is one of America's leading connoisseurs of the
Speaker 2: strange and bizarre, and has written books about sideshow performers,
Speaker 2: Oliver Cromwell's Head, Weird Things on eBay, and Unorthodox Messages
Speaker 2: from the Man Upstairs. Artsman's work has also appeared in
Speaker 2: Mental Floss, Bizarre and other publications, and he has been
Speaker 2: a featured speaker at various events including Explorer Mars, Humans
Speaker 2: to Mars Summit in Washington, d C. The Cody Island
Speaker 2: Congress of Curious People, New York's Comic Con, the Exeter
Speaker 2: UFO Festival, and the Brooklyn Historical Society. Some of his
Speaker 2: books include The Big Book of Mars, The Bomb Ahead
Speaker 2: of Oliver Cromwell, a memoir Chasing Ghosts, and We Are
Speaker 2: Not Alone. Mark, Welcome back to the program. Have you
Speaker 2: been good?
Speaker 3: Thanks for having me on, George.
Speaker 2: How how did you get involved in the strange the bizarre.
Speaker 3: I've always loved the strange and bizarre since I was
Speaker 3: a kid. I really got into it. You mentioned sideshow
Speaker 3: in my book American Side Show, and that's kind of
Speaker 3: where my love really began for I think all things strange,
Speaker 3: most notably with the world's tallest man ever, Robert Widlow,
Speaker 3: who I was fascinated with when I was a kid.
Speaker 3: He was eight foot eleven and a half inches tall,
Speaker 3: which was just kind of mind blowing that the human
Speaker 3: could be that tall. It's just the most giants of
Speaker 3: giants that we've ever known. So I was fascinated by him,
Speaker 3: and I saw the movie The Elephant Man, probably at
Speaker 3: too young of an age, and that really stuck with me.
Speaker 3: It's a pretty amazing movie, The Life of Joseph Merrick,
Speaker 3: so that that also kind of, I think, really pulled
Speaker 3: me into the things, all things strange and bizarre.
Speaker 2: Back in nineteen seventy four, I was a television producer
Speaker 2: in Detroit. They used to call me Captain Bizarre because
Speaker 2: I would pick many of the same stories you like
Speaker 2: and put them in my newscast. I mean, because remember
Speaker 2: those things.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, How can you not.
Speaker 2: Exactly tell us a little bit about the head of
Speaker 2: Oliver Cromwell.
Speaker 3: Well this, as you mentioned, I wrote a book called
Speaker 3: The Embalm Head of Oliver Cromwell of Memoir. So Cromwell
Speaker 3: was the Lord Protector of England, Ireland and Scotland in
Speaker 3: the mid sixteen hundreds. So he's the guy who led
Speaker 3: the charge to have Charles the First beheaded. So that
Speaker 3: put an end to the monarchy in sixteen forty nine,
Speaker 3: and Cromwell took over, and then he died in sixteen
Speaker 3: fifty eight and he was embalmed and then buried in
Speaker 3: Westminster Abbey, and then his son took over, but then
Speaker 3: he abdicated the Lord Protector Lord Protectorate, and Charles the
Speaker 3: Second resumed the monarchy. That's why we have a monarchy
Speaker 3: against today, and that's why we have Charles the Third now.
Speaker 3: But he was pretty angry about his dad being beheaded,
Speaker 3: so he exumed the body of Oliver Cromwell and he
Speaker 3: hanged it posthumously, and then he beheaded that embald head
Speaker 3: and he put it the top Withyminster Hall on a
Speaker 3: spike to deter anyone else from trying to commit regicide.
Speaker 3: And it stayed there for twenty five years, and then
Speaker 3: eventually a storm came and broke that steak in half,
Speaker 3: and it fell to the ground and someone picked it
Speaker 3: up and took it home, and the head then traveled around,
Speaker 3: passing through different hands for another two hundred and seventy
Speaker 3: five years until it was finally reburied in nineteen sixty.
Speaker 3: So the head traveled for three hundred years, which just
Speaker 3: I find to be an amazing story that some balm
Speaker 3: hedge just being passed around and shown the people, and
Speaker 3: people are studying it and questioning whether or not it's authentic.
Speaker 3: And so I wrote that whole story, covering the three
Speaker 3: hundred years of it, of its post life travels, and
Speaker 3: all told from the perspective of Cromwell's head.
Speaker 2: Did it decay at all?
Speaker 3: I mean it did, yeah, but it's still retained some features.
Speaker 3: There's a by the time, you know, you had photography
Speaker 3: coming around towards sort of the latter part of about three
Speaker 3: hundred years. There are some amazing photos from the nineteen
Speaker 3: thirties of a couple of scientists who are studying it.
Speaker 3: And you still see the whiskers, you can still see
Speaker 3: some of those swarts, you know, the warts and all
Speaker 3: with Oliver Cromwell. So it retained a few features. But yeah,
Speaker 3: I mean it was it didn't look great, but you know,
Speaker 3: you could still see that was the head of a
Speaker 3: former world leader today. So it's buried at Sydney Sussex
Speaker 3: College and Cambridge and the Anti Chapel there, but it's
Speaker 3: not known exactly where. So there's a plaque within the
Speaker 3: Anti Chapel that says that the head is buried within
Speaker 3: that space, but no one knows the exact positioning.
Speaker 2: Now, tell me about your work about the flat Earth.
Speaker 3: So this is just something recent I wrote about. So
Speaker 3: I do a website called weird Historian dot com, and
Speaker 3: that's a place for me to put all these kind
Speaker 3: of fun, weird stories. And what I love to do
Speaker 3: is just research some weird, weird topics and see what
Speaker 3: I dig up. And a lot of times that's going
Speaker 3: through different newspaper archives and see what pops up when
Speaker 3: I put in some strange keywords. So I looked up
Speaker 3: flat earth to see what people were saying about this,
Speaker 3: you know, from years in the past. So I found
Speaker 3: this story from nineteen twenty one of a religious leader
Speaker 3: who was running a school in Illinois, and his name
Speaker 3: was Wilburt Glenn Beliva, and he was preaching at least
Speaker 3: for ten years in this school system that the earth
Speaker 3: was flat. And this was the thousands of grade schoolers
Speaker 3: and high schoolers, and he was just convinced that this
Speaker 3: was the way, and he thought it was completely flat.
Speaker 3: I mean, this is, you know, like like all the
Speaker 3: flat Earthers, I think pretty much ascribed to the same beliefs.
Speaker 3: It was, you know, flat, the north poles in the center,
Speaker 3: there's no South pole, and then there's just a wall
Speaker 3: of ice that kind of prevents sailors from falling off
Speaker 3: at the rim of the Earth, that they go too far,
Speaker 3: kind of like the Antarctic going all around the Earth.
Speaker 3: And to me, it sounds like the Game of Thrones
Speaker 3: wall of ice, you know, the night Watch. But this
Speaker 3: was what the students were taught, and they were told
Speaker 3: that the flat Earth remained stationary in space, was just
Speaker 3: sitting there, and the Sun is revolving around us in
Speaker 3: sort of a spiral fashion, and that the Sun is
Speaker 3: opposed to being about ninety three million miles away as
Speaker 3: we know now, he said, the Sun was more like
Speaker 3: just a few miles away, not that far at all,
Speaker 3: And in terms of its size, it was much smaller,
Speaker 3: considerably smaller than we know it to be. So again,
Speaker 3: just taking perspective from a different perspective. On perspective, I
Speaker 3: guess you could say.
Speaker 2: Where do you find these stories? Mark?
Speaker 3: So I love going through newspaper archives, you know, and
Speaker 3: you just type in typing keywords and you never know
Speaker 3: what pops up. I mean, that's actually what what led
Speaker 3: me to write my Mars book, The Big Book of Mars,
Speaker 3: was stumbling across the story about the Martian Woman. Again,
Speaker 3: you don't know what you're going to find when you
Speaker 3: pop these things in, and then you kind of find
Speaker 3: yourself going down these rabbit holes like what is this about,
Speaker 3: and digging into it deeper and deeper.
Speaker 2: Ironically, one of your books, it's called We Are Not Alone,
Speaker 2: which is a similar title to the late New York
Speaker 2: Times science writer Walter Sullivan, who wrote a book back
Speaker 2: in the sixties, same kind of title.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's the same title. Actually I picked up after
Speaker 3: the book came out. I picked up a paperback of
Speaker 3: that book. But yeah, I mean, I love the UFO phenomena.
Speaker 3: It's another one I've been fascinated by since I was
Speaker 3: a kid, and I love digging into that whole story.
Speaker 3: It was just just ruled UFO the A couple days ago,
Speaker 3: Dueen twenty fourth when Kenneth Arnold saw the first nine
Speaker 3: discs over Mount Rainier in Washington and they became termed
Speaker 3: flying saucers. That's when that term was coined. So the
Speaker 3: book really covers off on the history of UFOs and
Speaker 3: were human experience, mostly beginning with the forties. It does
Speaker 3: dip back into some thoughts about ancient history, but mostly
Speaker 3: starting with like that era of the forties with the
Speaker 3: Kenneth Arnold's flying saucers, the food fighters of the earlier
Speaker 3: forties in World War Two, and then gets into just
Speaker 3: different eras you know, the nineteen fifties you had the
Speaker 3: contact Ese, this group of people that believed that they
Speaker 3: were in contact with different people from space, mainly mostly Nusians,
Speaker 3: but people from other plants in the Solar system as well.
Speaker 3: I'm kind of preaching a message of peace and concern
Speaker 3: about the atomication we had entered into. And then you
Speaker 3: get into more abductions in the sixties and seventies and
Speaker 3: continuing into the eighties of course and even today, and
Speaker 3: then so covers up all these different stories, but also
Speaker 3: takes a scientific perspective on the idea of extraterrestrial life
Speaker 3: and pursuits to discover extraterrestrial life, and then gets into
Speaker 3: more of the recent findings, particularly in the last you know,
Speaker 3: twenty twenty five years or so, all the news that's
Speaker 3: been out lately with the tic tac UFOs and these
Speaker 3: different science from Navy pilots. So it covers a really
Speaker 3: broad range of the UFO experience.
Speaker 2: In about a week and a half, we're coming up
Speaker 2: on seventy seven years since the Roswell episode.
Speaker 3: That's right, Yeah, yeah, just other same story.
Speaker 2: Now tell us about the strange case of the man
Speaker 2: who tried to contact Martians with the radio.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So this was the one I just kind of alluded
Speaker 3: to before, which is one of my favorite stories, and
Speaker 3: it is a story that really got me into writing
Speaker 3: all about Mars. So this was nineteen twenty six and
Speaker 3: he was a London lawyer who claimed that he was
Speaker 3: in telepathic communication with a Martian woman named Umaruu I.
Speaker 1: Love the name.
Speaker 3: And they were having these telepathic conversations and he's learning
Speaker 3: about life on Mars. How they're much taller than we are.
Speaker 3: They have a you know, one third gravity, so they're
Speaker 3: growing taller, seven eight nine feet tall. Umaru had big ears,
Speaker 3: Paul Hair. They had airships that they could fly in.
Speaker 3: They were peaceful, they drank tea, they smoked pipe, they
Speaker 3: had electrified fruit, you know, all these wonderful things that
Speaker 3: were going on on Mars. He's subscribing to people, and
Speaker 3: so in nineteen twenty six, Mars was in opposition to Earth,
Speaker 3: which means it was its closest point in its orbit
Speaker 3: about thirty five million miles. So he decided to try
Speaker 3: to send a telegram to the Martians. He worked us
Speaker 3: out with Umar Raru that their Martian scientists would be
Speaker 3: ready to receive the message from Earth. And so he
Speaker 3: worked with the Rugby Radio Tower in London, which was
Speaker 3: the world's tallest, most powerful radio tower in the world
Speaker 3: at that time, and they were connected with the Post Office,
Speaker 3: so the Post Office charged him their long distance rates,
Speaker 3: which I think was kind of funny, and I think
Speaker 3: they were able to promote that idea to get pressed
Speaker 3: about what they were doing. And he sent this message
Speaker 3: to Mars and fully expected a response, and this was
Speaker 3: covered by newspapers around the world like this was ended
Speaker 3: up being a pretty big story, and of course he
Speaker 3: didn't get any message back, and he tried it again
Speaker 3: two years later because Mars was not positioned about every
Speaker 3: two years or so. So he tried it again and
Speaker 3: of course again received nothing in response. And he said
Speaker 3: that umar Aru said that the Martian scientists were laughing
Speaker 3: at us because we were unable to received their messages,
Speaker 3: because we were not advanced enough to get the Martian
Speaker 3: messages back. So it was our fault that we weren't
Speaker 3: getting from the Martians.
Speaker 2: Now, what's this bizarre story about Kennedy versus Nixon back
Speaker 2: in sixty and a UFO spaceman.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, So I mentioned in the book We Are
Speaker 3: Not Alone that I covered a bunch of the contact ees.
Speaker 3: So one of them that I found especially interesting was
Speaker 3: a man named Gabriel Green and he ran for president
Speaker 3: in nineteen sixty and of course we all know that
Speaker 3: was the year Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon. But he was
Speaker 3: on the he was running for a short time and
Speaker 3: he was told basically by spacemen that he should run.
Speaker 3: He had met he had seen lots of space ships.
Speaker 3: He was actually based in the LA area, and he
Speaker 3: was a saucer club and had met some of them
Speaker 3: at one of the conventions, and of course he said
Speaker 3: they looked just like earthlings. And they urged him to
Speaker 3: run on the Space ticket. And he had had all these,
Speaker 3: you know, wonderful promises. I mean the kinds of things
Speaker 3: that you'd want any candidate to promise, right, So he
Speaker 3: he promised unlimited education for everybody, better housing and highways,
Speaker 3: better jobs, better wages. You know. He said that every
Speaker 3: man would be a rich man tomorrow. And he had
Speaker 3: this idea of a world up tomorrow today in utopia now.
Speaker 3: And he had this I have it on my website.
Speaker 3: It's also in the book We Are Not Alone. This
Speaker 3: amazing ad that random newspaper American needs a Space age president,
Speaker 3: and it goes through these wonderful promises he has that
Speaker 3: the Space people will help him bring to life. As
Speaker 3: of course, you know that that didn't really go anywhere.
Speaker 3: He eventually fell off of a ticket and he backed out.
Speaker 3: He didn't have enough support, but he did end up
Speaker 3: he said the Space people urged him to back Kennedy,
Speaker 3: which I think is you know, was nice because of
Speaker 3: course Kennedy did get the space program going and obviously
Speaker 3: got to the Moon. So you know, in the end,
Speaker 3: you know, we got we got somewhere with space with
Speaker 3: Gabriel Green support of Kennedy.
Speaker 2: At least I'll always remember Kennedy's moon speech.
Speaker 3: Oh, it's a wonderful speech.
Speaker 2: Wonderful person.
Speaker 3: We choose the moon.
Speaker 2: Now what about the Great Airship Flap of the eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so this was another really interesting story. I originally
Speaker 3: I wrote this for We Are Not Alone, and we
Speaker 3: ended up cutting this just because we.
Speaker 1: Had to edit.
Speaker 3: I had way too much material. But I found this
Speaker 3: to be really a fascinating lip the in the UFO phenomena.
Speaker 3: So this was the Great Airship Flap of eighteen ninety
Speaker 3: six and eighteen ninety seven, and it started in the
Speaker 3: fall of eighteen ninety six with these different aircraft airship
Speaker 3: sightings off the coast of California, and people were just
Speaker 3: seeing these these weird airships going across the skies and
Speaker 3: oftentimes you know, seeing people on them. They had different propellers.
Speaker 3: And again this was this was about three years before
Speaker 3: the first Zuppelin appeared, you know, and several years before
Speaker 3: obviously the Wright brothers had their first flight. That wasn't
Speaker 3: until nineteen oh three. So really the only thing flying
Speaker 3: was with hot air balloons at that time, and they
Speaker 3: wore people kind of working on some rudimentary aircraft at
Speaker 3: that time, but nothing that was like it was just
Speaker 3: gonna be traveling the sky, you know, calmly, seemingly.
Speaker 2: We didn't have the Hindenburg then, did we No?
Speaker 3: I mean, so it's just a what was going on,
Speaker 3: you know, And so this was being reported in newspapers
Speaker 3: across California. I have a great illustration of one of
Speaker 3: them from one of the headlines from eighteen ninety six
Speaker 3: on my Weird Historian site. You'll see the spacecraft with
Speaker 3: its weird propellers over over California. And so people were
Speaker 3: reporting on this and having different theories about it, and
Speaker 3: then it's just spread across the country into up to
Speaker 3: around April or May of eighteen ninety seven. People were
Speaker 3: just seeing these things all over the country, and no
Speaker 3: one really had an explanation for where they came from
Speaker 3: or who they were. And this was before we had
Speaker 3: the language of like UFOs or flying saucers any of
Speaker 3: that stuff. So people were just describing as these weird airships.
Speaker 3: And there was one really particularly interesting case in Texas
Speaker 3: and a werea Texas where one of them crashed.
Speaker 2: Classic case too.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and this was one where they said it was
Speaker 3: piloted by a Martian. So this was the other cases
Speaker 3: they han't talked about aliens or anything like that, but
Speaker 3: this one did. And it's interesting because again this is
Speaker 3: about April of eighteen ninety seven, so at that time
Speaker 3: there was a lot of talk about intelligent life on Mars.
Speaker 3: I know, we just talked about that case in nineteen
Speaker 3: twenty six, but this has been going on since the
Speaker 3: about eighteen seventy seven when Giovanni Schiaparelli, and Italian astronomer,
Speaker 3: thought that he saw line, he saw lines on Mars,
Speaker 3: and they were misinterpreted as canals. He called them canale,
Speaker 3: which is channeled. They got misinterpreted canals, and you have
Speaker 3: people saying that, oh my god, there's these giant Martians
Speaker 3: building canals all across Mars. They must be brilliant engineers.
Speaker 3: So the idea of martians was becoming more and more
Speaker 3: prevalence and written about in the newspapers and discussed by,
Speaker 3: you know, legitimate scientists. So this idea that maybe a
Speaker 3: Martian had piloted one of these airships and crash didn't
Speaker 3: didn't seem that crazy. This was stuff that was being
Speaker 3: talked about quite a bit at that time. Of course,
Speaker 3: a lot of this was ended up being told later
Speaker 3: by a historian who lived through this, like in nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy she came out said all this stuff was just
Speaker 3: written up by the local paper to kind of drum
Speaker 3: up tourism and some you know, economic benefits for the
Speaker 3: city because it was just a small town in Texas.
Speaker 3: But a lot of people believe that the Martian is
Speaker 3: still buried there today. So it's a pretty fascinating case.
Speaker 3: What I love about that is it's exactly fifty years
Speaker 3: before Roswell that you have this case of the UFO
Speaker 3: crashing and the town then having this economic boom around
Speaker 3: that whole story. And that's like a small microcosts before
Speaker 3: rosweld is and became in nineteen forty seven.
Speaker 2: There are you're right, there are reports at this means
Speaker 2: this dead et is buried in Aurora, Texas somewhere.
Speaker 3: Yeah, just in the grave guard And I know that
Speaker 3: people from moufon the which at the time that's happened
Speaker 3: were the Midwest UFO network. They were investigating it and
Speaker 3: tried to get down there and wanted to exhume the body.
Speaker 3: And I think they were not allowed to exhume the
Speaker 3: body to see what the story was.
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