Concho Valley Critters

Regular readers of this blog know I have a great fondness for desert plants and spend many hours on backroads near San Angelo in search of a species I hadn't seen before.  I do this with some caution because a surprising variety of animals call the Western Concho Valley home.  Perhaps two of the most dangerous of the four-legged variety are mountain lions and javelinas... 

The mountain lion, Felix concolor to biologists, has several popular names: puma, panther, and cougar being among them.  For the most part, our local mountain lions are happy to roam the mesas on the outskirts of town.  They wander close to the city occasionally.  In 1998, a couple of panthers meandered to rangeland near an elementary school and made a meal of deer making a meal of mesquite.  Joggers are surprised on occasion by large and curious cats.  I myself have come across the carcasses of unfortunate herbivores who met the wrong feline in the rough country...

Texas Parks and Wildlife (TPW) says "aggressive encounters" between humans and javelinas (aka collared peccaries aka Dicotyles tajacu) are rare.  This is a good thing since humans rarely fare well when they do occur.  Javelinas travel in family groups.  Their undeserved reputation for being ferocious has more to do with poor eyesight and a tendency to react violently when startled by a person they did not see coming...

Javelinas inhabit arid and semi-arid parts of the state, primarily the South Texas Plains, Trans-Pecos, and Western Edwards Plateau.  Prickly pear cactus, lechuguilla, mesquite beans, sotol, and the occasional insect are preferred dining options at the Cafe Javelina.  Avoid planting tulips, TPW advises, unless you want to attract peccaries who find the bulbs quite tasty...

Less threatening to humans than big cats and big pigs are cute little bunny rabbits.  The Desert Cottontail (Sylvilagus audubonii) is but one of several species of rabbits hopping across Southwest Texas rangelands near San Angelo.  Peter Cottontails distant cousins rarely need to drink water, getting most of the moisture they need from either dew or the plants they chew.  They, if I might be indelicate, are also coprophagic since this allows for greater nutritional efficiency...

Cave Myotis (Myotis velifer) bats spend their daylight hours in, not surprisingly, the crevices and caves of the Edwards Plateau and Trans-Pecos regions of Texas.  They hibernate during the winter months.  In the warm season, swarms of Cave Myotis appear at dusk, fluttering and flying erratically, using echolation (incorrectly but popularly called bat radar) to find flies and beetles, pausing to dip and sip when they come across a stock tank or other watering hole.  Their primary habitat, TPW says, is in areas dominated by creosote bush, paloverde, brittlebrush, or cactus.  Colonies of 1000 to 5000 Cave Myotis are not uncommon.  Nor is it rare for Cave Myotis to share cave space with other bats species.  The exception to their social nature is the Mexican Free-tailed Bat which does not tolerate their presence...

Birdwatchers traveling through Tom Green County on their way to or from San Angelo will see the silhouettes of hawks and vultures dotting the skies.  Many area residents rarely see more than these winged predators unless they take the time to sit silently at the State Park or pull to the side of the road in the ranch and farm country surrounding the city.  According to people who keep track of these things, some 356 species of birds have been seen in the Concho Valley.  Among these are the Scaled Quail (Callipepla squamata) and Chihuahuan Raven (Corvus cryptoleucus).  Both are found in the arid regions of the Southwestern United States and Mexico.  The habitat of C. squamata, also called Blue Quail or Cottontop, parallels that of the distribution of the desert plant species belonging to genera Prosopis (e.g., mesquite),  Condalia (e.g., javelina bush), and Cylindropuntia (e.g., Pencil Cactus)...

Chihuahuan Ravens use mesquite twigs to build their nests.  Their young hatch in May, the wet and green time of year, when insects abound in the moistened ground.  As adults, the birds will add small reptiles, carrion, cereal grains, and cactus fruit to their meals for a more well-rounded diet... 

Each autumn, hundreds of thousands and more hundreds of thousands of Monarch Butterflies (not illustrated here) pass through the Concho Valley enroute to their winter home in Mexico.  The Monarch is sometimes nicknamed the "Milkweed Butterfly" since the only thing its larvae can eat are milkweed plants.  Such a diet has a survival benefit for the species: milkweed is poisonous to most animals and birds.  Any critter foolish enough to dine on a Monarch is likely to suffer gastric distress as a result.  Nature being what it is, the Viceroy Butterfly mimics the Monarch's appearance to make itself less attractive to predators...

Vinegaroons (Mastigoproctus giganteus), despite their appearance, are not actually scorpions even though they're sometimes called Giant Whiptail Scorpions. They are arachnids who belong to the order Thelyphonida.  Although they are not venomous, they defend themselves by spraying a combination of acetic and octanoic acid which smells like particularly foul vinegar.  Enough said about their suitability as sleeping bag companions...

As a child, I was like many boys.  Reptiles fascinated me.  As an adult, I still find them intriguing.  Three of the many Concho Valley species that I've personally encountered are the Roundtailed Horned Lizard (Phrynosoma modestum), the Little Striped Whiptail (Cnemidophorus inornatus), and the rattler known as Desert Massasauga (Sistrurus catenatus edwardsii).  There is nothing to describe the pleasant surprise of seeing a darting bluetailed lizard on the long hike to my mailbox or coming across a fat and very sassy "horny toad" sunning in the caliche garden behind my house.  Meeting Mr Desert Massasauga is another sort of surprise entirely...

The following links can introduce you to more of our Concho Valley Critters.  The Sibley Nature Center represents the arid Llano Estacado country above the Concho Valley.  It is an exceptionally well done site and deserving of many visitors.  The "angelo.edu" link contains dozens of photographs of different corners of the local State Park at varying times of year...

San Angelo Nature Center:

http://www.sanangelotexas.org/index.asp?Type=B_BASIC&SEC=%7B00031FE3-CDFA-4F45-A7FE-06E279DEB6DA%7D

San Angelo State Park:

http://www.sanangelo.org/goodtimes/outdoors_sasp.php

http://www.angelo.edu/faculty/kboudrea/lagniappe/pictures_san_angelo_state_park/pictures_san_angelo_state_park.htm

Sibley Nature Center (Midland):

http://www.sibleynaturecenter.org/

In Texas, the Desert Massasauga rattles its way through the Concho
Valley, Llano Estacado, Trans-Pecos, and southern Rio Grande Plains

Shameless Commercial Endorsement/Self-Promotion:  For your fine art prints and greeting card needs, visit: http://louis-nugent.artistwebsites.com/

Note: All photographs located through Google Images, without source information except as noted: none  

The Power Game, Part One

"Voters added the most fractious division of all: the gridlock of divided government... (T)he conflicts built into our system of checks and balances have been exacerbated to the point of periodic paralysis in the past three decades-- by split partisan control of government."-- Hedrick Smith, The Power Game, 1988

Political affairs and legal matters intrigue me...

Occasionally, I revisit books that taught me much on those subjects.  Among them is Hedrick Smith's The Power Game, first read many years after completing my formal schooling.  I disagree with some of Smith's recommendations on how to solve the dysfunctional politics of our times.  But I have no disputes with his objective reporting and perceptive analysis...

The Watergate Complex in Washington, DC: site of America's
most infamous political burglary

Smith is nearly eighty now.  Born in Scotland and educated at Oxford in England and Williams College in the United States, he produced Frontline for PBS.  Smith edited and reported stories for the New York Times before winning an Emmy for his stint in public broadcasting.   He won a Pulitzer in 1974 for accounts of life and politics in the Soviet Union.  In the course of a year as a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a highly-regarded conservative think-tank, Smith tackled the problem of why Washington can't seem to get things done...

Over the course of 700 pages, The Power Game looks at the roles played by corporate lobbyists, the military industrial complex and congressional staffers in hammering out a budget and setting our national political agenda.  It also examines the changing nature of the Presidency and why someone like Lyndon Johnson could succeed in having his legislative agenda enacted yet fail so miserably in managing the Vietnam War.  Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter left office-- the one widely praised and the other considered weak and ineffective.  Yet both were, Smith contends, failures and one of them showed more disregard for the rule of law and the Constitution than Richard Nixon, a very smart man who triumphed internationally and destroyed his Presidency domestically...

The revelation that President Nixon had secretly recorded
conversations in the Oval Office proved fatal to his claims
of non-involvement in the coverup of a burglary at offices
of his political opposition

It is a book worth discussing over the course of several essays.  We begin with a topic Smith touches upon but does not discuss in great detail... 

Readers of my age who do not live and breathe politics likely remember Richard Nixon's resignation from the Presidency as the Big Story of the year in 1974.  He voluntarily left office facing certain impeachment by the House of Representatives and almost equally certain conviction by the Senate and removal from office...

The Watergate scandal, for younger readers, began with the June 17, 1972, arrest of five men charged with burglarizing offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington, DC.  An FBI investigation found cash connected to CREEP (the Committee to Re-elect the President) on the men.  The FBI investigation also sparked a labyrinthine plot to cover-up the involvement of John Mitchell, then the Attorney General of the United States, and John Dean, Presidential Counsel, in ordering the break-in after G Gordon Liddy, a former district attorney in New York State and the general counsel to CREEP, presented them with a plan to gather campaign intelligence by illegally wiretapping Democratic National Committee offices...

Left to right: Senators Fred Thompson, Howard Baker, and
Sam Erven hear testimony during the Watergate Hearings.
Thompson, a lawyer, became an actor famous for his role as
a New York City District Attorney.  Baken served as Senate
Majority Leader in President Reagan's first term.

A tape-recording system installed by Nixon to secretly record his conversations without the knowledge of other participants ultimately revealed the President was aware of his re-election campaign's criminal activities within days of the Watergate burglars arrests.  Not only was he aware, his own words confirmed, but Nixon himself approved a plan to derail the investigation by having the CIA falsely claim the burglary was related to a top-secret national security investigation...

Nixon had few options after this conversation became public.  He chose to resign and was succeeded by Gerald Ford, the nation's first Vice President to become President under provisions of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution.  Ford had not, incidentally, been elected Vice President by the Electoral College as the result of a nationwide ballot.  He attained that office as a result of the 25th Amendment after Spiro Agnew, Nixon's first Vice President, was forced from office due to criminal charges related to Agnew's time as Governor of Maryland.  Agnew later claimed, probably not truthfully, that Nixon and his allies concocted a bribery case against him to divert attention from the growing Watergate scandal and threatened to have him assassinated if he didn't play the game they told him to play...

[The irony of Nixon's downfall is that he installed his secret tape-recording system to "insure his place in history."  He did just that.]

Reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward flank publisher
Katherine Graham of the Washington Post, the newspaper whose
reporting toppled a Presidential administration.  In the odd way
politics work, the very liberal Graham became close personal
friends with the very conservative Nancy Reagan during Ronald
Reagan's Presidency, despite the Post's often unfavorable stories
about Mr Reagan's administration 

Richard Nixon triggered other action in Congress besides serving as a target for an impeachment investigation.  He personally disapproved of certain programs and refused to spend funds appropriated by the Congress to fund them.  Although he was not the first President to "impound" funds, he was the first to outrage the Legislative Branch to the point that it actually passed a law specifically stripping him of the power to withhold funds.  Thomas Jefferson had not spent monies allocated for naval vessels at the turn of the 19th Century, explaining to Congress the ships in question were poorly designed and manufactured with inferior materials, a combination which would result in defeat in battle on the High Seas...

Impounding funds, or the attempt to do so, proved costly for Nixon.  He had angered not only Democrats but Republicans in the House of Representatives and the Senate.  As the Watergate Scandal grew and evidence that the President had personally committed crimes also grew, Nixon's lack of friends in Congress meant he would likely become the first Chief Executive to be forced from office...

A two-third's majority of the Senate, in a trial presided over by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, must vote to convict a President who has been impeached by a simple majority of the House of Representatives.  The fact that Nixon feared conviction in what required strong bi-partisan agreement speaks to two simple facts: the wise President avoids criminal activity and the wise President does not do things to alienate members of his own political party...

Our Founding Fathers took the business of impeaching any President seriously.  They wisely heeded James Madison's advice to limit the legislative branch's power to do so only when the nation's leader had committed the gravest of crimes.  Personal dislike or partisan disagreement with Presidential policies would not constitute cause for removal from office...

Attempting to boost his image, President Nixon appeared
on the wildly popular Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In
comedy program.  Mr Nixon's previous television experience,
during debates with Senator John F Kennedy, did not go
well.

Note: All photographs located through Google Images, without source information, except as noted: none   

Fine Art America: A Shameless Commercial Endorsement...


I have recently become a member of the Fine Arts America family.  Prints and Greeting Cards of my work are now available for sale, with new items being added on a daily basis.  Please feel to visit, comment, or even purchase an item or two.  The link below will take you directly to my FAA page: 


http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/louis-nugent.html



The links below feature work by either myself or other artists:


For lovers of desert photography:

<a href="http://fineartamerica.com/art/photographs/desert/all" style="font: 10pt arial; text-decoration: underline;">desert photos</a>

<a href="http://fineartamerica.com/art/all/west+texas/all" style="font: 10pt arial; text-decoration: underline;">west texas art</a>

For lovers of tasteful nude photography:

<a href="http://fineartamerica.com/art/photographs/female+nude/all" style="font: 10pt arial; text-decoration: underline;">female nude photos</a>

For lovers of Paris:

<a href="http://fineartamerica.com/art/photographs/paris/all" style="font: 10pt arial; text-decoration: underline;">paris photos</a>


For lovers of Mesa Verde:
<a href="http://fineartamerica.com/art/all/mesa+verde/all" style="font: 10pt arial; text-decoration: underline;">mesa verde art</a>

Sunday Morning

Coffee, bagels, and thick newspapers...

Sunday mornings go better with these things.  They combine to create an island in time where we can both relax and inform ourselves about the world around us.  Many years ago, I lived in northern Virginia and had the Washington Post and New York Times for weekend perusals.  These days, home is a remote stretch of dry country at the edge of the vast Chihuahuan Desert.  We are lucky to have one weekend paper delivered to our homes.  A trip into the city means an out-of-town paper can be had...

Lyside Sulphur (Kricogonia lyside) Butterfly: its pale, yellow-
green wings make it almost invisible against the leaves of many
desert plants 

While the San Angelo Standard Times and San Antonio Express News may not be quite the same thing as newspapers from the eastern seaboard's megalopolis, they do an OK job of complementing beverages and noshes.  Each paper usually covers the front page with stories of primarily local interest.  This trend in journalism runs against the grain of cantankerous old fools like myself.  We remember hometown newspapers that summed up important national and international news on Page One, Section One (or Section A).  State and city news made up the second page or section unless a story truly merited a front page headline.  Collapsing bridges, city halls in flames, gun battles between bank robbers and the state police-- these are events that people probably should know about without digging through the paper...

Soapbush (Guaiajacum angustifolium) grows in the arid and
semi-arid regions of the Rio Grande Plains, Trans-Pecos,
and western Concho Valley of Texas

Occasionally, the Sunday paper has a feature that proves somewhat useful.  There is a pale yellow butterfly that flits through our desert skies.  I did not know the name of this butterfly until this past weekend.  Glancing at the Science section in the San Antonio paper, I saw a picture of this little winged wonder.  The caption identified it as a Lyside Sulphur (Kricogonia lyside).  An accompanying article stated the butterfly was native to the southern part of Texas, New Mexico, and Mexico.  Its host plant is guayacan, also known as soapbush, which grows along the Rio Grande, across the Trans-Pecos, and in the western Concho Valley.  This link between bug and bush explains why I see so many little yellow butterflies here...

Distribution map for Soapbush which has been officially
documented as far north as Tom Green County

Distribution of Lyside Sulphur Butterfly overlaps that
of Soapbush, its host plant

Another Express News article talks about the changing demographics of public schools in Texas...

The concern for educators and politicians is not the increasing number of Hispanic students combined with a declining "Anglo" enrollment.  It is the fact that a lower percentage of Latinos in Texas complete high school or go on to earn a degree when compared to their white counterparts.  The explanation for this, experts agree, can be linked to a higher poverty rate which makes the immediate struggle for daily survival more important than intangible promises of a better life in the future thanks to higher education...

Farrah Fawcett during her school days at
W B Ray High in Corpus Christi, Texas

[By way of human interest reporting as an excuse to post photographs of two lovely women, your blogger mentions Farrah Fawcett and Eva Longoria.  Both were born in Corpus Christi.  Fawcett, a pop-culture poster icon and one of Charlie's original TV Angels, walked across the auditorium stage at W B Ray High School, a proud graduate in 1965.  Ray's Hispanic student enrollment during those days, I'm told by people who lived in Corpus at that time, was under 10%.  Latino enrollment now exceeds 60% and Anglo enrollment is slightly above 30%.

Longoria, also a pop-culture icon due to her television role as Desperate Housewives' vain Gabrielle Solis, drew her first breath ten years after Farrah began thinking about high school graduation parties.  She attended Roy Miller High School-- W B Ray's arch-rival on the football field and basketball court.  (One school took the State High School Football Championship in 1959, the other in 1960.  In Texas, where God is Our Coach Who Art In Heaven and prayers directed to Him generally include requests that He smite gridiron rivals mightily with a first-rate smiting, such matters are taken seriously.)  Student population demographics have mirrored the changes at its cross-town rivalry.  Today, Longoria personifies her high school's "success story."  In Longoria's student days, quintessentially "white" actor Dabney Coleman was the Roy Miller alumni who'd found fame and fortune in Hollywood.]   

Roy Miller High alumna Eva Longoria

In the long term, lower educational rates-- regardless of ethnicity--  translate into the probability that impoverished kids will share the poverty of their parents... 

The former Lone Star Republic ranks 39th in percentage of adults with an Associate Degree or higher.  A University of Pennsylvania Institute for Higher Education study found 43% of young Texas Anglos have a post-high school degree of some type.  But, among Hispanics, only 15% share that attainment.  Less educated workers perform tasks requiring fewer challenges to the intellect.  This equates to lower wages.  And lower wages become lower sales tax and property tax revenues.  Government services decline and a city, county, and state become less attractive to employers...

Fort Chadbourne, Texas: ruins and restoration

"West Texas," a weekly feature in the Sunday Standard-Times, touted the opening of a $2 million Visitor Center and Museum at the site of Fort Chadbourne, 45 miles or so south of Abilene.  Military men occupied the installation from 1852 until 1867.  Providing water to support the fort's detachment constantly challenged the Army since the fort lies many a mile from the nearest river or lake.  The cost of transporting water eventually became too prohibitive...

Fort Chadbourne, Texas

If I read the article correctly, the Visitor Center has a potential to not only attract tourists but benefit scholars as well.  A 7000 volume research library is part of the complex whose exhibits include Native American artifacts, frontier weapons, utensils and clothing used by early settlers, ranching equipment, and a stagecoach.  The center occupies 12,500 square feet...

The Visitor Center is named in honor of Roberta Cole Johnson, whose life spanned the years 1911 to 2008.  She was born in Ohio and a proud graduate of Vassar who came to live and ranch in the dry part of Texas when she seventy years old.  Mrs Johnson came to love the ruins of Fort Chadbourne which had been purchased for $500 in gold from the Army in 1874 by the widow of Sam Maverick who gave his name to stray cattle and politicians.  Roberta Johnson left several million dollars to be used for nonprofit causes such as preserving our history...

Entrance to Roberta Cole Johnson Visitor Center, Fort Chadbourne

But, of course, the most important part of the Sunday paper are the comics which not only provide a few chuckles to lighten the darkness of this grim world but can also be used as wrapping paper for holiday presents when you're on a tight budget...           

Gabrielle Solis spurs on the Spurs

Note: All photographs located through Google Images, without source information, except as noted: Lyside Sulphur (Kricogonia lyside) butterfly, photographed by Will Cook, from carolinanature.com; Soapbush (Guaiacum angustifolium) from desertflower.wordpress.com; Guaiacum angustifolium range map from Biota of North America Project (BONAP); Lyside Sulphur distribution from Butterflies of Houston and Southeast Texas, University of Texas; Fort Chadbourne Visitor Center by Joy Miller of the Abilene Reporter-News, Abilene, Texas; Fort Chadbourne ruins (color) from Bronte, Texas, Chamber of Commerce; Fort Chadbourne ruins (black and white) from True West magazine    

Dry Country Delights

Rain falls infrequently in the southwestern part of Texas.  The Concho Valley does, however, usually see precipitation during the latter half of Spring.  Some years, like this one, see an abundance of rain.  Fools jump around, thankful for the flashfloods that further erode the soil and cause thousands of dollars in damage to the roadways. The land greens.  Carpets of flowering herbs cover the ground.  Sometimes, if the temperatures stay under ninety degrees for a prolonged period and several rains fall, the desert almost appears to disappear until Summer...

Many flowering plants near San Angelo need little in the way of moisture to flourish in July and August when the thermometer's mercury passes the triple digit mark and the rain gauge grows dusty from months of non-use...

Devil's Bouquet (Nyctaginia capitata)

The Devil's Bouquet and the Angel Trumpet belong to the family Nyctaginaceae, more popularly known as Four O' Clocks due to the way the flowers of some species open late in the day.  Angel Trumpet can be located on limestone soils in the Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts.  Its wicked cousin, Devil's Bouquet, inhabits dry parts of Texas and New Mexico...

Angel Trumpet (Acleisanthes longiflora)

Potatoes (with apologies to Dan Quayle for the spelling) are members of the Solanacae family along with Purple Groundcherries and Silverleaf Nightshades.  Neither requires much rain to flower... 

West of the 100th meridian and south of the 32nd parallel, the Purple Groundcherry pops up as Winter leaves.  It has a wider natural distribution than Devil's Bouquet or Angel Trumpet, extending up to the shortgrass prairie country.  Silverleaf Nightshade ranges farther-- stands can be found from California to Louisiana...

Silverleaf Nightshade (Solanum eleagnifolium)

I recall Purple Groundcherry, incidentally, as the first plant I identified after moving to this area.  This was thanks to the first book I purchased here:  James A MacMahon's Deserts, one of the National Audubon Society Nature Guides series.  Its habitat is, MacMahon writes, ”open areas in desert plains", particularly those which have been disturbed by agricultural activity...

This identification was an empowering moment.  Very often in life, we face situations that tax patience and inner strength. It is a good thing to occasionally solve a minor mystery such as the identify of a plant growing in the yard.  To do this is to know that other problems can be solved with patience and inner strength even if we must, on occasion, seek out services from a guide who has traveled the same country we now explore...                                                                                                                  

Purple Groundcherry (Quincula lobata)

Note: All photographs by Louis R Nugent

Date With Fate

Aside from the Pan-American Highway wending its way through the desert sands, there was nothing but the Presencias Tutelares to cause Pampa Acha to stand out from the surrounding desert landscape.

That is, until the gargoyles came....Dark Twilight: Gargoyles Unbound, Scott Corales, Fate, October 2004

Old magazines serve useful functions...

Waiting rooms make good homes for outdated periodicals.  As we kill time before our appointments, we thumb through them between glances at our watches and the clocks on the wall.  Old magazines take up space in our houses.  Stacks of them, precariously perched and strategically placed, convince children grown and gone that Mom and Pop are hoarders.  But our kids are too young to understand that old magazines must be saved for rainy days when there is nothing worth watching on TV...

... there was nothing but the Presencias Tutelares to cause
Pampa Acha to stand out from the surrounding desert...

A bookshelf in my office holds a poorly balanced column of back issues of Fate.  Drizzly desert afternoons come rarely but, when they do, I have a treasure trove waiting and ready to inform me about ghosts at the Alamo, comets that set fire to Chicago, gargoyle attacks, sea serpents of Nova Scotia, and how I can lose weight by understanding my past lives...

The first issue of Fate probably wouldn't fetch as much at auction as an intact copy of the initial appearance of Playboy.  Hugh Hefner launched his magazine in December 1953, frustrated by a painfully stagnant career at Esquire.  It would go on to sell millions of copies monthly.  The publishers of Fate, on the other hand, danced for joy after the number of its subscribers crossed the 100,000 mark...

Curtis Fuller and Raymond Palmer, both successful editors, launched Fate in March 1948.  Volume One, Number One of the magazine recapped Kenneth Arnold's sighting of flying saucers over Washington State in June of the previous year. The reading public responded well because people really did want to know what Arnold saw.  Unidentified objects continued to appear over American skies.  The mood of ordinary citizens and military officials had shifted from curiosity to something just shy of alarm...

Fate, Volume One, Number One

Forty-five years later, when Fuller sold his interest in the magazine, he wrote Fate's purpose had always been "...to explore and to report honestly the strangest facts of this strange world and the ones that don't fit into the general beliefs of the way things are"...

Whether or not the magazine succeeded in accurately recounting Fortean phenomena is a matter of individual judgment.  But no one can deny Fate ever failed to tantalize its readers...

Or it may be that I'm easily amused.  As I write this, I have about a dozen issues of the magazine on the desk beside me.  Topping the stack is March 1988.  Its stories include Dowsing for Oil, Sea Serpents of Nova Scotia, Virgin Mary's Latest Visits, and Stagecoach Stop on the Spirit Trail. 

Warning to boaters and swimmers, Nova Scotia

This last feature is about the St James Hotel of Cimarron, New Mexico, whose guest register records visits by Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, Jesse James (who stayed under his Mr Howard pseudonym), Annie Oakley, and General Phil Sheridan of American Civil War notoriety.  The man who wrote Ben Hur and served as territorial governor, Lew Wallace, bunked at the St James when he journeyed to northeastern New Mexico.   

Current owners of the hotel report minor problems:  frisky phantom ladies of the evening and a gunslinger's ghost who seems to like fresh orange juice.  Taking the advice of Oz, an Albuquerque psychic and Wiccan priestess, the property's managers burned juniper branches in a partially successful attempt to cleanse the hotel of undesirable spirits...

Turning to the classified ads in this issue, I am informed that I can MASTER MENTAL TELEPATHY! for $2.95 (check or money order) sent to a P O Box in Long Island.  A chap residing on Highway 34 near Plattsmouth, Nebraska, had (thankfully) solved the mystery of vampires and would share this useful information for some green paper with Abe Lincoln's portrait.  A gentleman near Jasper, Arkansas, was selling real estate-- a cave that combined an absolutely spectacular view of the Ozarks with protection from nuclear holocausts...

Carnival game featuring Mrs O'Leary's much maligned bovine

November 1990's issue told me the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 was (more likely than not) sparked by a comet that decided to become invisible and split in half as it passed over the Windy City.  Historians can now acquit Mrs O'Leary's infamous lamp-kicking bovine of those arson charges...

By way of trivia, from another article in the same issue, I also learned Rosemary's Baby, the classic horror film set in New York City, was inspired by an incident at Chicago's Hull House where a woman gave birth to a boy with horns and a forked tail...

Raymond Palmer's name may seem vaguely familiar to readers with an interest in old science fiction.  Best known for publishing Richard Shaver's "I Remember Lemuria" in the March 1945 issue of Amazing Stories, Palmer was also the editor who bought and printed Isaac Asimov's first short story...

Richard Shaver and Raymond Palmer

["The Shaver Mystery" actually began in 1943 when Palmer received a fan letter whose author claimed to have discovered mankind's original language.  Interested, the editor wrote back and received a rambling 10,000 word reply to his reply.  Shaver claimed to have been held captive by malevolent robot-like midgets living inside the Earth (which is hollow, not solid as claimed by scientists whose minds are clouded by "thought control" rays of these sinister subterraneans).  Managing to escape, Shaver saw it as his holy duty to warn the rest of the world. 

Palmer revised the letter, publishing it as a novella titled "I Remember Lemuria."  The magazine sold out on the newsstands and the happy editor asked Shaver to produce more tales about the evil deros.  Accounts of their misdeeds appeared in Amazing Stories for several more years, sparking intense debate between readers who believed Shaver had stumbled onto the truth and those who saw a bit of paranoid schizophrenia in his writings.  Shaver spent the last years of his life, in case one might wonder about his sanity, examining cave rocks to find the true history of Atlantis (as opposed to Plato's account) which had been imprinted upon them through some laser-like device by survivors of the doomed continent.]   

Palmer with Robert Bloch (left) and Louis Sampliner.  Bloch
penned Psycho, turned into a classic of horror and suspense by
director Alfred Hitchcock

Some people are probably destined to do what they do and Raymond Palmer may have been one of those people.  A childhood accident and botched surgery literally left him a hunchbacked dwarf.  Taunted and lonely, he turned to stories of fantastic worlds and became the editor of a fanzine called The Comet in 1930.  His semi-professional efforts came to the attention of Ralph Milne Farley, a then popular space-opera novelist, who, in 1938, suggested Ziff-Davis publications hire Palmer to replace a recently fired editor of Amazing Stories...

When Ziff-Davis moved its offices from Chicago to New York, Palmer resigned from the company and partnered with Curtis Fuller, another Wisconsin born Ziff-Davis employee who had no desire to leave the Midwest, to launch Fate...

Fuller bought Palmer's interest in the magazine seven years later when Palmer decided to concentrate on publishing materials with religious themes.  Among said spiritual works was the Book of Oahpse, delivered to our spiritually somnolent world in 1882, by John Ballou Newbrough.  He was a New York dentist prone to trances that produced 900 pages of revelations from "Embassadors of the angel hosts of heaven prepared and revealed unto man in the name of Jehovih".  Newbrough died of influenza nine years after he enlightened humanity when he (and a group of orphans recruited to live in a commune) tried to turn New Mexico desert into a farmer's paradise along the Rio Grande...   

Did this fellow's relatives move from France to Chile?

With his wife Mary as a co-editor, Curtis Fuller produced Fate for over 45 years until his retirement in 1991.  He sold the magazine to Llewellyn Publications, a giant in the New Age Market which now publishes it strictly online...

There is a certain sadness to this change to an electronic format.  Kindles and laptops may deliver reading content but there's no substitute for a rainy day, hot cup of coffee, and stories about a Mystery Pyramid of the Ozarks and the UFO Attack on Los Angeles at 2:25 AM on Wednesday, February 25, 1942...

But the story of the flying saucers can wait for another day.  Join me as we ride with Carlos Abett, his wife Theresa, and their children, through the Chilean desert on a July night in 2004.  Near Pampa Acha, daughter Carmen Albert notices four "dog-faced kangaroos" with wings.  These gargoyles (for such seems to be the best way to describe creatures of this ilk) easily match the car speed of 120 kilometers per hour.  Suddenly, two of the four airborne monstrosities veer to the side.  They swoop down toward the road...  

For those interested in more conventional unidentified flying objects:

http://www.fatemag.com/subjects/ufos/senator-goldwater-ufo-files/

Amazing Stories, June 1947

Note: All images located through Google Images without source information except as follows: none