Re; ALLIGATOR PATROL

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Press
NEWS & COLUMNS

By Jim Knipfel

Someone called me with a hot story tip the other day.
That hadn't happened in awhile. Well, it had—but not a
story like this.

It seems that patients in local hospitals were being
spirited away in the night and taken to an undisclosed
location, where strange and perhaps even alien
experiments were performed upon them. After several
days of torture, they were then being returned to
their hospital rooms. Unlike most alien abduction
cases, these people seemed to be retaining perfect
memories of what had happened to them.

[...]

In the movies, New York is almost perpetually besieged
by the inexplicable—King Kong, The Colossus of New
York, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Q, Gremlins 2,
Doctor X, God Told Me To, Ghostbusters, countless
others. But there were plenty of real stories here,
too. Throughout its history, the city has had more
than its share of enigmas, both natural and otherwise.
Haunted hotels, the Staten Island Bigfoot, UFOs
hanging around the Brooklyn Bridge and snatching the
occasional Manhattanite, alligators in the sewers.

(Funny thing about the alligators in the sewers. What
most people tend to forget is that the legends were
based on a real incident, which was reported in the
New York Times in 1935. A couple kids were shoveling
snow in the Bronx one evening when they stumbled
across a 13 foot alligator splashing around in the
sewer. A mob gathered, dragged the gator out through a
manhole, and stomped it to death. The incident left
people thinking there might be more gators down
there—and they were right about that. But the urban
legend as we know it today can be attributed to a
famous scene in Thomas Pynchon's V., involving teams
of city-employed gator hunters patrolling the tunnels.
It was in V. that the gator-in-the-sewer stories took
on their present and eternal form—brought back from
Florida, flushed down the toilet, albino, etc.)

But that's all an aside. Point being, though, that New
York used to be awash with monsters of all kinds.... 

[...]

Volume 18, Issue 37

http://www.nypress.com/18/37/news&columns/knipfel.cfm

Cf. V., Ch. V, "In which Stencil nearly goes West with
an alligator" ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0408&msg=92748

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0209&msg=70498

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9904&msg=37174

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0010&msg=50179





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