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Lesley

Grey Matter

3.13.7

Strange New Mexico

Recently I have become quite a fan of a little site called My Strange New Mexico. Some stories are only mildly strange like the one about the hippie communes in Placitas in the 1960’s and 1970’s, but there are more and they update with new ones quite often.

In one of the stories I found a perfect c2c guest, only he lived over a hundred years too early. His name was Dr. John Ballou Newbrough. He was commanded by Angels to buy one of them new fangled typewriters and with their help he wrote Oahspe: A new bible in the words of Jehovih and his Angel Ambassadors. Newbrough’s book is the first to ever use the word Starship, so Star Trek owes him some major thanks.

Newbrough reveals in the book that the star of Bethlehem was actually a starship that the angels flew down in to keep an eye on the birth of Jesus and to spread the message of his birth. Dr. Newbrough was a real doctor and practiced in New York for years. I think it was there that he wrote the book, which attracted a small band of followers and a rich businessman named Andrew Howland. They became known as Faithists.

Eventually the spirits told Newbrough it was time to head west and set up a home for orphans. Somewhere near what is known as Las Cruces, New Mexico, Newbrough got off the train, had Howland blindfold him and let the spirits guide him to where the Faithist Colony would be. You can find many pictures of the colony here, it was a pretty large place. It is also a place that I never knew existed and if I am ever down near Las Cruces again, I will take the time to find it. Newbrough died in 1891, but his ghost is said to still be at the colony, another reason it would be a great place to check out. There are said to still be at least 1500 Faithists, they even have a Wikipedia Page.

I don’t think I have ever mentioned it in Grey Matters before, but there is also a stone here in New Mexico that fascinates me. It is known as the Los Lunas Mystery Stone and was discovered around 1930. Apparently the mystery stone is not terribly well known, both my sister’s live in Los Lunas and yet when I brought it up, neither had ever heard of it. The stone was found about 18 miles west of Los Lunas, near what is called Hidden Mountain. The mystery stone is a stone tablet, the inscription contains 216 letters and is from an alphabet older than any known European settlement in America. There are many “translations” of the mystery stone, but probably the most believable one was made by Harvard scholar, Robert Pfeiffer. According to Pfeiffer, the mystery stone writing is a form of Paleo-Hebrew and is a paraphrasing of the ten commandments.

As you can imagine, many people try to write off the mystery stone as a hoax, but how many people in the 1930’s could write in Paleo-Hebrew and would bother to chisel a stone and carry it out into the middle of the desert? It just doesn’t seem likely to me.

Now, just for fun, it is time for a 1980’s flashback -- anyone remember Atari?

In 1982, ET was the hottest movie in the world. Atari wanted to cash in, so after paying Steven Spielberg 20 million for the rights, they spent a full 6 weeks designing and writing the ET game. Since the movie was so popular Atari made 4 million copies of it, even though only around 2 million people owned Atari machines. They sold almost half of the games, but the game sucked so much that most of those came back.

So what is the best place to bury an ET? In the New Mexico desert, of course. Not too terribly far from Roswell, in Alamogordo you will find millions of copies of ET buried, along with another great Atari idea, the mindlink game controller, which was an apparatus players would wear on their head to control the game with their eyebrows -- I couldn’t make that up if I tried.

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