Apologies if you hear the wind whipping around on the roof of this little radio shack out here tonight. There’s some strip of metal the previous owners tacked down to cover a weak spot in the roof, and it’s slapping around the swamp cooler. And until your host robs a bank, well it’s going to stay that way because that's the only way to get the ten grand the roofing company wants. It’s all right. It’ll dry up in time.

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Tonight we escape the freezing late-winter West and enjoy some time in the piney forests on the Tennessee River, in the Alabama counties where a strange visitor brought horror & dismay over the long hot summer of 19&69.

Thanks for supporting this program via Patreon.com/DesertOracle.

Soundscapes by RedBlueBlackSilver, written & hosted by Ken Layne, and broadcasting tonight at 10 in Joshua Tree on KCDZ 107.7 FM.

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"What could it be? There was no balloon and there were no aeronauts. Some strange phenomenon had occurred in the higher zones of the atmosphere, a phenomenon of which neither the nature nor the cause could be explained. Today it appeared over America . . . ."

Tonight we take a look at the life of George Ellery Hale, pioneering astronomer and the father of Palomar Observatory . . . where the mysterious new green comet was discovered, only 11 months ago and visible in the skies this week. Thanks much to our supporters on Patreon for keeping this radio show & podcast on the air!

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For as long as people have lived in the desert southwest, they have told stories of Coyote, that peculiar personality that's both a common wild canine and the devious trickster god who created the world. 

Also: A lot of people are seeing coyotes stand up and walk away like a man. This is EPISODE #179 of Desert Oracle Radio.

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Night has fallen on the desert. The year is still fresh and new. We don’t all have to talk about stoves, all the sudden.

We can do better. Let’s do better.

Let’s talk about monsters.

Desert Oracle Radio (C)(P) 2017-2023 • http://DesertOracle.com

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Four decades ago, Betty and Barney Hill were driving back from a visit to Niagara Falls when they endured a strange assault in the deeply haunted White Mountains. Ever since their strange story went national in the mid-1960s, we all know the scene: a dark night on a lonesome highway, and something comes out of the sky, or out of the woods, and then it all becomes very hazy.

Desert Oracle Radio (c)(p) 2017-2023 http://DesertOracle.com

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"Gentlemen!" yelled their frontier guide, Captain Jefferson Hunt, "All I have to say is that if you take that route, you will all be landed in Hell!"

So began the four-month-long "shortcut" that left the starving Lost '49ers in the middle of Death Valley at Christmas. Hopefully your holidays won't be quite so exciting, although it's generally better to have an adventure than just sit around eating pies. Soundscapes by RedBlueBlackSilver, written & hosted by Ken Layne, and broadcasting tonight in Joshua Tree on KCDZ 107.7 FM at 10 p.m.

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Winter Solstice is coming and the Luddites are celebrating on their flip-phones. That's all we've got to say about it. Listen on your radio in Joshua Tree or Moab or Fresno or various other community stations. And don't forget to support Desert Oracle Radio when you're filling the Christmas stockings with money!

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The desert is the kind of place you think maybe you might *discover* something. A treasure, maybe. The Lost Ark. Some old glass bottles, some old human bones. Maybe a secret history of the ancient world, hidden for 1,500 years in a sealed jar buried in a pile of guano.

Soundscapes by RedBlueBlackSilver. Hosted by Ken Layne. Supported by fine listeners like yourself, on our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/desertoracle

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It's Thanksgiving time in America and we are talking turkeys, and sage grouse, and we are taking your calls on our scary-story line. What does the arrival of the Northern Flicker mean, in augury? How has the Triple Goddess survived relentless persecution by the patriarchal religions of bureaucracy? And why did Benjamin Franklin adore the wild turkey? Soundscapes by RedBlueBlackSilver, written and hosted by Ken Layne.

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