
Midwestern Strange
Hunting Monsters, Martians, and the Weird in Flyover Country
- 232 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
Midwestern Strange chronicles B.J. Hollars’s exploration of the mythic, lesser-known oddities of flyover country. The mysteries, ranging from bipedal wolf sightings to run-ins with pancake-flipping space aliens to a lumberjack-inspired “Hodag hoax, ” make this book a little bit X-Files, a little bit Ghostbusters, and a whole lot of Sherlock Holmes. Hollars’s quest is not to confirm or debunk these mysteries but rather to seek out these unexplained phenomena to understand how they complicate our worldview and to discover what truths might be gleaned by reexamining the facts in our “post-truth” era. Part memoir and part journalism, Midwestern Strange offers a fascinating, funny, and quirky account of flyover folklore that also contends with the ways such oddities retain cultural footholds. Hollars shows how grappling with such subjects might fortify us against the glut of misinformation now inundating our lives. By confronting monsters, Martians, and a cabinet of curiosities, we challenge ourselves to look beyond our presumptions and acknowledge that just because something is weird, doesn’t mean it is wrong.
 
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Authorās Note
- Prologue: My Year of Living Strangely
- Part 1. Monsters
- Case File #1. The Beast of Bray Road: 1936āPresent
- Case File #2. Oscar the Turtle: March 1949
- Case File #3. Mothman: November 15, 1966āPresent
- Part 2. Martians
- Case File #4. Joe Simontonās Space Pancakes: April 18, 1961
- Case File #5. The Minot Air Force Base Sighting: October 24, 1968
- Case File #6.The Val Johnson Incident: August 27, 1979
- Part 3. The Weird
- Case File #7.The Hodag: 1893āPresent
- Case File #8.Project elf: 1968ā2004
- Case File #9.The Kensington Runestone: 1362(?)āPresent
- Sources
- Selected Bibliography