but no matter how long you search you will never find The Navidson Record in theaters or video stores. Furthermore, most of what’s said by famous people has been made up. I tried contacting all of them. Those that took the time to respond told me they had never heard of Will Navidson let alone Zampanô.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤAs for the books cited in the footnotes, a good portion of them are fictitious. For instance, Gavin Young’s Shots In The Dark doesn’t exist nor does The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, Volume XXVIII. On the other hand virtually any dimwit can go to a library and find W. M. Lindsay and H. J. Thomson’s Ancient Lore in Medieval Latin Glossaries. There really was a “rebellion” on the 1973 Skylab mission but La Belle Nicoise et Le Beau Chien is made up as is, I assume, the bloody story of Quesada and Molino.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤAdd to this my own mistakes (and there’s no doubt I’m responsible for plenty) as well as those errors Zampanô made which I failed to notice or correct, and you’ll see why there’s suddenly a whole lot here not to take too seriously.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤIn retrospect, I also realize there are probably numerous people who would have been better qualified to handle this work, scholars with PhDs from Ivy League schools and minds greater than any Alexandrian Library or World Net. Problem is those people were still in their universities, still on their net and nowhere near Whitley when an old man without friends or family finally died.

ㅤㅤㅤㅤZampanô, I’ve come to recognize now, was a very funny man. But his humor was that wry, desiccated kind soldiers whisper, all their jokes subsurface, their laughter amounting to little more than a tic in the corner of the mouth, told as they wait together in their outpost, slowly realizing that help’s not going to reach them in time and come nightfall, no matter what they’ve done or what they try to say, slaughter will overrun them all. Carrion dawn for vultures.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤSee, the irony is it makes no difference that the documentary at the heart of this book is fiction. Zampanô knew from the get go that what’s real or isn’t real doesn’t matter here. The consequences are the same.
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