National Free Press, published February 1967. This is as cheap as it gets, folks. There are exactly zero actual stories in here. The highlight is a column by the crackpot psychic The Great Criswell, aka The Amazing Criswell. Criswell was pretty famous in the 60s, and appeared on The Jack Paar Show, as well as others. Our favorite predictions of his are the complete destruction of Denver by a mysterious jelly, the destruction of London by a meteor, and the relocation of the U.S. capital from Washington, D.C., to Kansas. Criswell’s book, entitled Criswell Predicts from Now to the Year 2000, boasts that 87% of his predictions have come true. We can only evaluate the ones in the Free Press, and they are as follows:

Criswell: I predict that a future President of the United States will be a hopeless alcoholic. Reality: Just the opposite—the voters must have been hopelessly drunk to put some of these guys into office.

Clearly, 87% percent of Criswell’s predictions did not come true in our little test. But you have to give him credit—he was bold. What else can you say about a guy who once claimed the world would succumb to mass cannibalism? But here’s one prediction that will definitely come true: We will have more on The (not so) Great Criswell down the line.

In the truth is oh so much more strange than fiction department, a New Mexico funeral home is being sued after accidentally sending a dead woman’s brain to her next of kin. According to the Albuquerque Journal, the deceased’s brain was sent to the family in a bag of personal effects that sat forgotten in a car until the day after the funeral, when a foul odor began emanating from the bag. Inside they found a smaller bag labeled with the woman’s name and the word “brain,” and inside that, a rotting surprise certain to supply lifetimes worth of nightmare fuel. The understandably furious family has filed a lawsuit against the De Vargas Funeral Home & Crematory, but owner Johnny De Vargas claims the mistake was not made by them, but by another funeral home in Utah, where the woman died in a car crash. “We inherited the problem from Utah,” he said. “We are a very reputable company and we were dealt a bad brain, er, I mean hand.*”

*We lied. He actually only said hand"**

**Dammit.

A couple of months ago we wrote about the famous 1967 Bigfoot sighting in Bluff Creek, California, and now this week the elusive creature is in the news again after being filmed in Minnesota. Peter and Casey Pedrowski were staying overnight in their hunting cabin and had set up a motion-activated trail-cam to determine if any game were wandering nearby in the wee hours. And as it happened, something was. When they looked at the photos weeks later, they were shocked see the above image. However, the brothers are skeptical about whether the figure is a Bigfoot. “I still don’t know what to think about it,” said Casey Kedrowski. “I’m still not convinced.”

We have to agree with the wildlife experts on this one. As pulp enthusiasts, we’re just as eager to find a Bigfoot as the next guy, but not to the extent that some hoser headed out into the cold for a piss after drinking a sixer of Moosehead starts to look like one. If the Kedrowskis had aimed the camera thirty degrees right the shot would show a dark figure with steam rising nearby and instead we’d all be talking about whether it was a photo of the Devil. We appreciate the image for what it is—either a good practical joke or a bad hoax. Nothing more.

A calf was born this yuletide season—but not just any calf. This one has a cross on its head. It was born in Connecticut on the farm of Brad Davis and Megan Johnson. At first, the newborn’s cruciform marking was obscured because his mother Fuzzy had rearranged it by licking the fur on his head. But when the calf dried, his owners beheld the cross and they were amazed. “It was really quite a sight,” Davis told his local newspaper. “The first night that he was here, when we shut the lights out late at night, the only thing you could see in here was that cross showing in the dark. It was really quite a feeling. It made the hair stand up on the back of my neck, actually.” Co-owner Johnson says Moses will never see the inside of a slaughterhouse. “We’re going to make sure he gets a good life and doesn’t get eaten,” she promised. 

Over on the opposite side of the cultural chasm, an evolutionary scientist would suggest that Moses is not a sign from God but rather a textbook example of natural selection. Because of a pattern that randomly appeared on the calf’s head, he gets to live to a ripe old age rather than end up as a Big Kahuna Burger, which means the likelihood he’ll one day sire an offspring with a cross on its head is fractionally higher. Each time a similar pattern appears, there’s a chance that cow will likewise be spared the abbatoir and will in turn reproduce, which means, given thousands of years, an entire species of untouchable cows might be roaming the American landscape with crosses on their heads. So is Moses an example of divine intervention or Darwinian science? Let the debate begin.

Police in Peru have arrested members of a gang that allegedly killed peasants in order to remove the fat from their bodies and sell it abroad in anti-wrinkle cream. Three suspects under arrest have already admitted to five killings, but Peruvian police think the macabre practice may date back for decades. At a press conference yesterday, authorities displayed two bottles of the fat, which forensic tests had confirmed were of human composition. Police described how gang members killed victims, beheaded them and hollowed out their bodies, then suspended them over candles while the heat liquefied the fat. The announcement was met with some skepticism abroad, however in a world where people pay small fortunes for esoterica such as powdered tiger penises and monkey gall bladders, the possibility of a black market in human fat—and the $60,000 per gallon price tag gang members claim the substance fetched—cannot be easily discounted. The region where the gang operated, a remote area in the high Andes known as Huanuco, has had sixty people go missing this year alone. And while Huanuco is also frequented by Shining Path drug traffickers, the gang members were able to lead police directly to a site where a fat extraction had taken place (above). For now, Peruvian authorities have begun to shift their efforts toward finding out who might be buying the fat, and in which countries it might be distributed and sold. Meanwhile, other members of the gang, including the alleged leader, remain at large.     

It reads like the backstory of an Indiana Jones movie: 2500 years ago an army of 50,000 men vanished without a trace in the Egyptian desert. At least, this was the account by Greek historian Herodotus. He wrote that the army had been sent by the Persian king Cambyses from Thebes to destroy the Oracle of Amun, located in the Oasis of Siwa. But the army never made it to Siwa. Instead they were swallowed up by a great storm that, according to Herodotus, “[brought] with it vast columns of whirling sand, which entirely covered up the troops and caused them wholly to disappear.” 

However, we found it odd that two men described in all the articles we saw as “top researchers” presented their discoveries in a film rather than a scientific journal, so we did some research of our own and found that two Italian siblings/filmmakers also named Angelo and Alfredo Castiglioni gave us five controversial African shockumentaries in the 1970s, including Addio ultimo uomo, Africa ama, and Africa dolce e selvaggia, films in which audiences saw unedited footage of the severing of a penis, the skinning of a human corpse, the deflowering of a girl with a stone phallus, and a group of hunters tearing apart an elephant’s carcass.

Are these Castiglionis the same two guys? They’d be in their early seventies by now, but yes, it’s the same pair. Not one website we saw made this connection, so we’ll just pat ourselves on the back. We haven't seen the Castiglionis' films, but we don't particularly like the type because they present African life as something savage and cruel while helping to blind Westerners to the fact that our mass shootings and modern warfare are far bloodier and more destructive. But if you’re interested in learning how much people can mellow over the years, have a viewing of these respected researchers’ early shock flicks. They’ll probably give you nightmares, but they also prove that restless, morbid, voyeuristic minds can eventually mature. Which means there’s hope for us here at Pulp. 

Since it’s nearly Halloween—our favorite American holiday by far—we thought we’d show you this monster that was found in Venezuela. It’s supposed to be a siren. Allegedly, a local oil worker managed to snap these photos before government officials showed up and whisked the carcass away. Or so the story goes. Fact or fiction? We’ll defer to Orson Welles on this one.     

Sequence of photos from Life magazine showing a subject experiencing the effects of a 300 mph wind in the face. It looks bad, but this guy is lucky because the technicians like him. They launch jelly donuts at the guys they hate.      

It was today in 1967 that Bigfoot enthusiast Roger Patterson shot his famous movie of what he claimed was a genuine Bigfoot, aka Sasquatch, in a remote area of California’s Six Rivers National Forest. We took a look at the Wikipedia entry on this, and it goes into excruciating detail. In fact, we think the entry on regular apes is shorter. But these types of things do fan the flames of passion, if for no other reason than so many people seem to have a deep seated need to believe in the bizarre and/or supernatural. Roger Patterson's Bigfoot encounter certainly qualifies as the former. After reading everything we could find on the event, we draw no conclusions, except to say that if it was a hoax, it was one of the most perfectly planned hoaxes of all time.

For scientists, all the film analysis claiming Patterson’s Bigfoot was real meant little. Contradictions of established scientific patterns must come with proof, and Patterson had nothing to explain why his Bigfoot violated a universal rule of primate physiology. But he swore on his deathbed in 1972 that his film was authentic. Robert Gimlin said the same for decades, wavering slightly only in 1999, when he admitted, “…I’m an older man now...and I think there could have been the possibility [of a hoax]. But it would have to be really well planned by Roger.” In the end, we may never know what happened that day. Scientific evidence supporting a genuine Bigfoot encounter is lacking, yet nobody has come forward with irrefutable proof of a hoax. The only analysis of the event must rely on the film, but the original negative is lost. Only Roger Patterson knew the truth, and he took that with him to the grave.

Is it art? We we wouldn't presume to judge, but it’s certainly weird enough to be pulp. The prestigious National Portrait Gallery in London has just acquired British artist Marc Quinn’s unique sculpture “Self,” which Quinn created in 1991 from nine pints of his own frozen blood. When originally exhibited the piece triggered both revulsion and admiration, and soon became a symbol of the BritArt movement, as well as something of a sensation outside art circles. Its notoriety grew even more when a rumor circulated that it had melted after its storage freezer was accidentally unplugged, but Quinn has refused to confirm or deny that particular tale. Even if it had thawed, the sculpture is allegedly designed to be refrozen if needed, which means the original “Self” and three others Quinn has created over the years to embody his essence and chart the course of his aging all survive in the hands of various collectors and museums. Quinn’s incandescent genius has inspired us here at Pulp Intl. to create a piece that embodies our essence. We’re thinking of a liver made from frozen beer.