In 1902, English language newspapers brought word from the Congo, via a rather dubious source, that an unknown freshwater cryptopus with a hankerin' for human thought-meat was prowling the Uele river (from the Sept. 7 San Francisco Call, also reprinted elsewhere):

TERRIBLE OCTOPUS OF THE UELLE RIVER

It Hunts the Natives and Feeds Upon the Brains of Its Human Prey.

A Belgian officer just returned from the Congo Free State reports that in the caverns of the Uelle River there dwells a species of octopus that presents a grave danger to all who navigate the river in small boats.

The strange beasts are called "megwe" by the natives, and are very numerous in the neighborhood of the station of the Amadis, owing to the number of rocks and caves in that region. They attack the native canoes, capsizing them easily with their tentacles and, according to their state of hunger, seizing one or two men.

The octopus drags his human prey to his cavern and there, without inflicting the slightest external wounds, feeds on his victim's brains by inserting the points of his tentacles in his nostrils. He generally keeps his prey fifteen hours, then lets the body float out on the river.

"I was an eye witness to a disaster of this kind," says the Belgian. "A canoe was capsized in the river and one of the three occupants disappeared. When the survivors swam ashore they told us that an octopus had turned their boat over and carried off their companion.

"The next morning about 9 o'clock the body was found floating and no trace of any wound could be found, while the only abnormal appearance was the swollen state of the nostrils. On examination it was found that the brains had been extracted. The natives of the Uelle all dread the 'megwe.' while those of the Itimbri know nothing of its existence."

It turns out this report was over two years old -- the officer hadn't "just" returned (and wasn't "Belgian", but that's another matter). It went viral, 1900s style, because everything old is new again.

However, I'm leading the post with it since it's pithy and things are about to get more wordy, ambiguous, and French.

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Was the plot of the original The Fly ripped from the headlines... of 80 years previously?

In 1878 a report from Bombay reached Australia describing an amazing and terrible new invention (reprint from The Brisbane Courier, July 27):

The Teleport.

The telephone and the phonograph are no doubt very wonderful examples (says the Melbourne Daily Telegraph) of the purposes to which the power of electricity may be applied, but these novelties begin to sink into insignificance before the still more recent strides of science. The newest contrivance is called a teleport, and is described by a Bombay paper "as an apparatus by which man can be reduced into infinitesimal atoms, transmitted through a wire, and reproduced safe and sound at the other end." The apparatus, according to the Indian paper, consists of a powerful battery, a large metal disc, a bell-shaped glass house, and a large iron funnel connected with the wire. An experiment is described as follows:—"A dog was placed on the metal disc, and a 'powerful current' was applied to it. After a while the animal disappeared, and was found at the other end gnawing a bone, just as it was doing before it was 'transported.' Afterwards a boy was experimented upon. Under the glass house, it is reported, the inventor of the machine placed a Goanese boy, Pedro—who was grinning as if he thought it a good joke—and we suspect it was not the first time he had been in that house. The current was again applied to the under part of the disc, and the same effect was observed as with the dog. The house was instantaneously filled with a vaporous man, whose features and parts were quite distinct until they disappeared. Even the grin was discernible as a mere film of vapour—in fact, it seemed to us that the grin remained even after the body had disappeared. In fifteen seconds Pedro was gone; but they found him also at the end of the wire. It was then attempted to send the boy and the dog along at once, but by an unfortunate accident the 'infinitesimal atoms' of the boy and those of the dog got 'mixed' in transitu, and the result was that they both looked dreadfully unnatural creatures." At least, so says the Bombay paper in its account of the first experiments with the "teleport." It says that by means of the teleport a man will be able to travel from India to England by submarine cable in a few minutes, but unfortunately there is always the danger that the "disintegrated atoms" of one man may become mixed with those of another, as in the case of Pedro and the dog, and for this reason it is feared that the teleport will not supersede the railways—at least, not so far as the passenger traffic is concerned.

Left unanswered, fortunately, was "How does Pedrodog eat?"

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Will levitation be a public utility like electricity? Will flying battleships patrol the skies, or sea-borne ones be forced aloft by submarine subterfuge? Will city planners move skyscrapers around like chess pieces, lifting them into the air with ease and plonking them down in better locations? Will famous monuments tour the world for everyone to see? Will we execute criminals by electrically charging them and humanely propelling them into space to a Saganian poetic fate? Will our enemies try to secretly do the same to us against our will?

In 1903, all these possibilities seemed tantalizingly within reach.

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The above is from Popular Mechanics, Oct., 1927. As per my previous post, Julian Huxley is believed to be the first to depict "tinfoil hats" in fiction, however he did not invent them. Paranoids have been using deflector beanies since the early 1920s when aluminum foil became widely available to the public in the form of food packaging. The Mind Control Elite, whom Huxley rubbed shoulders with, have known about them for far longer.

While the article is from over a year after Huxley's first publication of "The Tissue-Culture King" (Apr. 1926), it illustrates an already mature paranoid culture of deflective headwear use. Of course, paranoids had to pretend they were merely decorating their hats, hence the inclusion of "other fancy wrappings" with no deflective properties -- their true purpose of freeing themselves from the psychotronic grip of the Forces of Mind Control would obviously subject them to increased attention from same. That this "decorative" fad ceased shortly after it was covered in the popular press is not surprising; paranoids started putting foil wrappings under their hats to ensure discretion.

Hascombe shows off his incredible animal monstrosities.

"The Tissue-Culture King" is a short story by Julian Huxley first published in The Yale Review in Apr. 1926, and later in Amazing Stories, Aug. 1927. It's notable for containing reputedly the earliest use in fiction of an anti-mind-control foil deflector beanie -- colloquially known among orthonoids as a "tinfoil hat".

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Would-be global mind-controller Stirner, in anti-mind-control
mesh-suit, confronts his Russian nemesis Kaczynski, seated.

This illustration is for the 1926 Russian novel The Lord of the World (Властелин мира) by Alexander Belyaev (also transliterated as Beliaev or Belyayev). I'm not sure what edition the image is actually from; it could be a later reprint. The story is about a man who tries to take over the world using mind control.

Although Belyaev is well-known in Russia, most of his work (see the end for more examples) doesn't appear to have been translated into English until recently, if at all. Someone named Maria K. has been releasing translations since 2012, including this one as Ruler of the World (I haven't read her version so I can't comment on the quality). Because it may not be that accessible to English speakers, here's a detailed synopsis based on a machine translation of the original (or skip below for my analysis):

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(Click for full dustjacket.)

Did super-intelligent Martian bees visit Earth in flying saucers to observe us and examine the stockpile of gold at Fort Knox, concerned that we were on the verge of destroying the Sun? According to Gerald Heard in his book The Riddle of the Flying Saucers: is another World watching? (1950), that is the only conclusion that agrees with the facts surrounding the riddle of the saucers.

I have the original UK edition; there's also a US edition with the title and subtitle flipped. (The 1953 Bantam edition has two new chapters covering sightings outside the US and up to '53, among other changes -- full text here).

This was the second nonfiction book ever published on the flying saucer phenomenon, the same year as The Flying Saucers Are Real by Donald Keyhoe. Although Keyhoe's book was more influential among UFOlogists, Heard's cover art matches more closely what became the popular image of flying saucers, even if his theories about the saucers' pilots were more unconventional.

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Special Correspondence to The Press.

NEW YORK, April 13.—The Wm. Reed Hollow Earth Exploring club has just been incorporated. The purpose of this strange organization is to prove by experiment that the earth is hollow and that such a thing as a north or a south pole does not exist.

It is the theory of the men planning the trip to the inside of the earth that there's a hole where the north pole ought to be. By means of balloons, submarine boats, gyroscopes and high explosives they expect to slip over the edge of the earth's crust into the inside of the shell and there find continents and kingdoms yet unseen.

The executive committee of the club has talked of two starting points for their explorations. One is in Norway and the other in Greenland. Roy Knahenshue, the aeronaut, has been asked to take charge of the balloon experiments.

Wm. Reed, the former insurance man who heads the club, says it is prepared to spend $1,500,000.

"It's time for action now—not a time for mere talking," said Reed when seen at his home. "But the earth is hollow and our investigations will soon prove it. The poles so long sought are but phantoms. There are openings at the southern and northern extremities of the earth. In the interior are vast continents, oceans, mountains and rivers. Vegetable and animal life is evident in this new world. And it is possibly peopled by races yet unknown by dwellers on the earth's surface."

"Our equipment is to be nothing but the best," said W. S. Rookey, the business manager. "We shall use Holland boats, dirigible balloons, wireless telephone and telegraph and the gyroscope—in fact anything that will be of value."

The gyroscope is to be used in place of a compass for the reason that the compass has been proven unreliable by previous explorers. John P. Holland, inventor of the submarine, and Hiram Maxim, the maker of explosives, have been asked for their opinions on the expedition. Holland believes his boat can operate under ice, and Maxim says it can be liberated by the use of nitrogelatin.

[The Spokane Press, 1908-04-13, p.4.]

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Happy New Year again! Here's a 1991 Bollywood film called Ajooba Kudrat Kaa (English: The Magnificent Guardian) about a young girl, Sasha, who befriends a Yeti and helps save him from yetinappers. Skip ahead to 1:06 in the clip above for the song and dance number, "Yeti I Love You!"

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Happy New Year! Here's US President Woodrow Wilson being delimbed by a Yeti with the help of a knight monster (representing the Cotton Trust and the Steel Trust, respectively), by Rudolf Herrmann, from a cover of Die Muskete (1916-03-30), an Austrian humor weekly.

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