When I was a kid there was a program, a wildly popular documentary program, called In Search Of.... Narrated by Leonard Nimoy it offered viewers the chance to explore all sorts of speculative and paranormal phenomena. Bigfoot, Nessie, UFOs, disturbing disappearances, all got the sonorously serious treatment sending school kids back to the playground week after week to debate and opine. This is also around the time that books like Strange Stories Amazing Facts, In Search of Dracula, Chariots of the Gods, and scads of UFO and Ghost related paperbacks offered up paranormal topics as info-tainment. This show is entertaining enough even if it does tend to tackle timeworn topics. But even the newer topics it does tackle bring up an interesting question.
This weeks announcenment that Oprah is retiring her TV show made me wonder? Did we wind up with Geraldo, Donahue, Sally Jessie and O herself because of the way our hunger was stirred by the above?! Talk about conspiracies! In all seriousness Bigfoot and Nessie and UFOs are one thing but the death of Presidents? Princess Diana? TWA Flight 800?
Is our hunger for conspiracy so great that we would rather ignore the real life heartbreak of these incidents and the incredible impact they've had on our society and the world so that we can laze away at the tellie for one more hour? I opt for a larger conspiratorial worldview wherein we are constantly distracted by such "investigations" while more important quetions go unanswered. You get the whole show, 13 episodes on 3 discs.
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