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up in the military and the government. The age of selfishness turned into an era of disgrace. We are still trying to recover from it. Forteans have gone from a glorious Golden Age to a time when curiosity and the search for knowledge is condemned and obfuscated by a malignant conservatism. Mount Everest, once the most remote place on earth, is now littered with tin cans and trash from a thousand expeditions. Loch Ness is just another smelly pond. People still see blobs of light bouncing around the skies in Oklahoma but nobody talks about them anymore. In many quarters, nobody even cares. We are now rewving up for the beginning of the end, the millennium when everything is supposed to reach a shattering climax. This may be the best time to take a look backwards at the Golden Age. The 1960s began when astronomers all over the world reported seeing a mysterious satellite circling the earth in a polar orbit (going from pole to pole). It wasn’t from Russia or the U.S. The news media labeled it ‘the Black Knight” and reported on its movements for many months. The first astronauts and cosmonauts were ordered to look for it on their sorties into space. But it eventually went away as mysteriously as it had appeared. In 1960, an engineer named Tim Dinsdale also made news when he shot a few feet of movie film of something 90-feet long swimming in Loch Ness. Assorted experts, including the RAF, studied the images and confirmed that there was definitely something there. It looked like the generations-old mystery of Loch Ness was about to be solved. (It wasn’t.) A few years later, in 1967, a young man named Roger Patterson managed to take a short movie of a hairy humanoid in the northwest. . .the first and only film strip of the legendary Bigfoot. Scientists are still arguing over its authenticity. Exciting things were happening on every level of society. Martin Luther King was leading the long-overdue Civil Rights Movement. A band of bright young lady writers started the Feminist Movement...al- though, according to screenwriter Nora Ephron, their main accomplish- ment seems to have been the re-invention of the ‘‘Dutch treat.’’ Con- sciousness Raising became the war cry for the entire younger generation. The Beatles changed the course of popular music then went off to India to find a Guru who might help them find themselves. A sexual revolution caused us to cast off the restraints of centuries of Blue Nose repression. Bloodier revolutions took place all over the world, from China to France and throughout Africa. A great wave of change swept the whole planet. 6 / Operation Trojan Horse End Times Blues