On July 28th, members of the Ullage Group took a field trip to Bannerman Castle, organized by Dr. Mamie Caton.

 
 
 
 
 
For train passengers, a partial and too-brief view of Bannerman Castle can be had just south of Beacon, NY.  The castle is situated on a small island once called Pollepel (renamed Bannerman’s Island), now part of […]

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The debate over gay marriage is, perhaps, misguided.  Rather than extend the franchise, why not just scrap the practice?
I admit that I’m biased against marriage by observation of my parents.  It seemed to be an arrangement in which a male alcoholic slumped in a chair, binge-drinking and channel-surfing; he had a whistle around his neck to call an unhappy female, who waited on him […]

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I’m puzzled by the word “spiritual.”  I understand it as a noun, meaning a genre of vocal music.  But as an adjective, it has me stumped.
When I meet someone who spatters his or her sentences with it, I sometimes ask what it means.  She or he usually refuses, often with projectile hostility.  One woman retorted […]

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There are many reports of Alien Big Cats (ABC’s, as their devotees like to call them) in the fortean database.  This one, which I found in the French daily Libération (July 25, 1994), and passed along to the INFO Journal at the time, seems to have been overlooked.  I was unable to find a follow-up, […]

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I found this anonymous pencil drawing at a flea market.  There’s probably a story behind it; perhaps it’s just as well that we don’t know what it is.
(Posted by Doug Skinner)

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A holiday weekend marred by beautiful autumn weather and massive transit disruptions didn’t keep the curious from turning out for the Ullage Group’s presentation, “Straight Talk About Hoaxes.” Anthony Matt’s multimedia exegesis of the 1969 “Paul is Dead” hoax was a rousing success. Original tapes of radio shows and phone calls, furnished by the DJ […]

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You can find la Porta Magica in Rome, on the Piazza Vittorio.  It’s what remains of the villa of Massimiliano Palombara, a 17th century occultist.
There are at least two competing stories about it.  One is that an archetypical mysterious stranger visited Palombara, and asked for funds and a room to test his alchemical know-how.  Palombara agreed; the stranger locked […]

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I think my high school offered one basic course in psychology, which I did not take. Surely it dealt in stripped-down basics - the classification of emotions, some de-sexualized Freudian theory, and maybe a little Jung thrown in for the artsy kids. I’d like to think, if I’d had the opportunity to take a class […]

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The Star Lodge, or Summer Palace, outside Prague, is another of those curious buildings that dot the Czech Republic.  The Letohradek Hvezda was designed and built in 1555 by Archduke Ferdinand of Tyrol; it was supposedly a hunting lodge, but the fact that it’s shaped like a six-pointed star, with four stories, each keyed to a […]

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Today is the birthday of John Keel, the author of Jadoo, The Mothman Prophecies, and many other books close to the heart of the Ullage Group.  For those of you who are counting, he’s now 79.  Anthony Matt and I visited him Sunday: we took him out to lunch, helped him shop for groceries, and […]

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