Saturday, June 21, 2008

Muir goes One Step Beyond the Grassy Knoll...

I recorded an interview yesterday with the website, Beyond the Grassy Knoll. This site has been around since July 2002 and deals mostly with conspiracy history, yet also devotes coverage to socio-cultural issues, events, and epochs. It has often covered such topics as rock and roll, and pop culture.

In particular, we spent about 90 minutes discussing the 1959-1961 paranormal anthology, One Step Beyond, hosted by John Newland. The interview was a lot of fun because we talked about the real paranormal cases (and the evidence behind them...) that formed the basis for many of the half-hour episodes. In particular, we discussed -- in detail -- about ten or so episodes that followed documented cases, provided eye-witnesses and the like. I researched all that material for my 2001 book, An Analytical Guide to TV's One Step Beyond, and it was great to revisit some of it.

The interview will be posted by Monday morning, June 23rd here, so I hope you'll check it out. Some of this stuff is very creepy. What I've always appreciated about One Step Beyond is that even when it took clear dramatic liberties with tales of the unexplained; it also attempted to explain the parapsychological concepts (such as crisis apparitions, apports, automatic writing, re-incarnation, psychometry, etc.) with a high degree of fidelity and accuracy to the literature about such phenomena.

I hope you'll check out the the interview. You can also read a transcript of my chat with the late host (and director) of One Step Beyond, John Newland, right here.

1 comment:

  1. I had no idea that John wrote a book dedicated to 'One Step Beyond'. I will be purchasing this book as OSB & the original 'The Outer Limits' were my childhood must-sees.

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