Over the long weekend I happened upon a New York Post article talking about a massive anomaly discovered beneath the ice in the Antarctic. It turns out that scientists think it’s a huge asteroid that might change our view of the history of the planet. Here’s a bit…

Some researchers believe it is the remains of a truly massive asteroid more than twice the size of the Chicxulub space rock that wiped out the dinosaurs.

If this explanation is true, it could mean this killer asteroid caused the Permian-Triassic extinction event, which killed 96 percent of Earth’s sea creatures and up to 70 percent of the vertebrate organisms living on land.

However, the wilder minds of the internet have come up with their own theories, with some conspiracy theorists claiming it could be a massive UFO base or a portal to a mysterious underworld called the Hollow Earth.

This “Wilkes Land gravity anomaly” was first uncovered in 2006, when NASA satellites spotted gravitational changes which indicated the presence of a huge object sitting in the middle of a 300-mile-wide impact crater.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog or if you’ve followed my various podcasts you know that I love a good Hollow Earth conspiracy, and you can’t really put words like “anomaly” and “Antarctica” together in a headline and not have me reaching for my tinfoil hat. That said, I’m a big fan of science and a huge hater on unsubstantiated speculating disguised as reasoned, evidence-supported findings. But, honestly, the Hollow Earth and Nazi UFO mythology is way more fun than “Found big rock.” And if this turns out to be a UFO base for the Third Reich you better watch this video…

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This weekend I saw that Ira Levin’s The Boys From Brazil is celebrating the 4oth anniversary — the book was published in 1976. I’ve been preoccupied with neo-Nazis and their old school inspirations, and the book’s birthday made me remember my first take on the film it inspired. Back in 2012…

Hollywood usually blows it when it comes to conspiracy theory movies, but in 1978 they got it right. Here is Wiki’s take on The Boys from Brazil:

Young, well-intentioned Barry Kohler (Steve Guttenberg) stumbles upon a secret organization of Third Reich war criminals holding clandestine meetings in Paraguay and realizes that Dr Josef Mengele (Gregory Peck), the infamous Auschwitz doctor, is among their number. He phones Ezra Lieberman (Laurence Olivier), an aging Nazi hunter living in Austria, with this information. A highly skeptical Lieberman tries to brush Kohler’s claims aside…

Featuring a great cast and a zany story line with a now-campy-seeming style, Boys has it all: evil Nazis, vengeful Jews, South American locales, aging civil servants, genetic manipulation, Steve Guttenberg, and all those blue-eyed boys. Most importantly, Boys understands that first rule in making a good conspiracy theory film: The theory must be true.

Here’s the film…

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Yesterday morning I came across this The Guardian author interview with Norman Ohler whose new book, Blitzed, is an exhaustive excavation of the drug culture at the center of the Third Reich. Here are a few words…

…“Yes, it is strange,” he says, smiling at my giddiness. But then he has long believed in a certain kind of time travel. “I remember the 90s. The wall had just come down, and I was experimenting with party drugs like ecstasy and LSD. The techno scene had started up, and there were all these empty buildings in the east where the youth [from east and west] would meet for the first time. They were hardcore, some of those guys from the east – they didn’t understand foreigners at all – and the ecstasy helped them to lose some of their hatred and suspicion. Sometimes, then, you could step into a room, and you could just see the past. Of course, it’s not like that now. I don’t take drugs any more. But I can remember it, and maybe that was why I was able to write this book.”

The book in question is The Total Rush – or, to use its superior English title, Blitzed – which reveals the astonishing and hitherto largely untold story of the Third Reich’s relationship with drugs, including cocaine, heroin, morphine and, above all, methamphetamines (aka crystal meth), and of their effect not only on Hitler’s final days – the Führer, by Ohler’s account, was an absolute junkie with ruined veins by the time he retreated to the last of his bunkers – but on the Wehrmacht’s successful invasion of France in 1940.

Here’s an episode of “Nazi Underground” investigating the drug culture at the center of the Third Reich…

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We’ve just begun to experience the first cooler days in awhile here in Nashville, and the drop in temperature has put me in mind of autumn and Halloween. It’s too early for aisles of orange and black in the grocery stores, but they’ve already turned their leaves. It’s too early for costume store ads, but I saw one yesterday. It’s too early for spooky blog posts, but why fight it?

Here’s a teaser for the dreadful posts I hope to come up with next month: 2014 marks the 35th anniversary of Werner Herzog’s remake of the F.W. Murnau classic Nosferatu. Not only does Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre tip its hat to one of the earliest and greatest vampire films, and to the horror genre in general, it also attempts to create a link between the movies Herzog and his German peers were making in 1979 and the brilliant German cinema that was made before World War II and the rise of the Third Reich.

Here’s a great making-of documentary about the movie…

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