Saturday, June 28, 2008

Wild Releases #293 - #296

We had an impromptu picnic at Mammoth Park in Mammoth, Pa., today so everyone could see my brother and his family who have been visiting this week. One of the great features of Mammoth Park is a really tall slide that is tons of fun for kids and grups alike, especially when you go down sitting on a sheet of wax paper for maximum velocity. I left two books while we were there: "The Fall," by Garth Nix, which I left on top of some rocks in a landscaped area of the parking lot, and Lemony Snicket's "The Vile Village," which I left at the top of the giant slide. I'm thinking now that I should have reversed the locations of the books since "The Fall" would be much funnier at the top of the giant slide. :)

Mammoth is not that far from Kecksburg, Pa., where a UFO is said to have crashed in the woods back in 1965. The official story is that it was just a meteor, but eyewitnesses claim it was far more than that. Quite a few people tracked the object into the woods and reported seeing an acorn-shaped object embedded in the ground. The military arrived in short order and cordoned off the area, and supposedly left with the object on the back of a truck. In the mid-1990s, the television show "Unsolved Mysteries" came to Kecksburg to try to find out what *really* happened in the woods that night. They built a model of the *meteor* and donated it to the village of Kecksburg when they were done filming. It is now mounted on a pole behind the fire hall and attracts a fair number of tourists a year.

Since it was kind of on our way home, I decided to go in search of the elusive town of Kecksburg. With the excellent navigation help of Sister No. 6, we found the Kecksburg UFO Monument and I was able to leave two books there: "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," by Steven Spielberg, and "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial," by William Kotzwinkle and Melissa Mathison. You can see a release photo here.

These two books were releases #81 and #82 for MRWiley's 2008 Movie/TV books release challenge.

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