In Defense of Peckman

a weird short story from the archives

Hello, folks. So, in the interest of keeping this interesting, here’s something completely different.

In case you’re unaware, I have been quietly working on another book and going through the archives while doing so and holy shit…I have written a ton of shit over the years.

Much of this stuff has never seen the light of day or if it did, it was in super limited capacity on various blogs or notebooks. I’m finding things that I completely forgot about and am enjoying remembering details in order to put them into context.

But seriously, there’s so much material it’s mind boggling as I’ve been at this for a lifetime at this point. 🥴

Anyway, I came across a weird little short story that I wrote years ago and enjoyed re-reading it so I figured I would share it here. I have no idea what else to do with it as it’s an oddball story and unlike most of my current work. If I’m lucky it will eventually make it into a book but we’ll see.

Longtime readers might understand that I used to write a lot more fiction and other experimental type of stuff - See: my first (out of print) book. I’d really like to get back to that kind of writing and to also reprint that first book with a new and updated edition.

The logical side of my brain says that this is all procrastination but fuck it, I’m drowning in material here from decades now. It’s crazy. I need to win the lottery so I can hire help to sort through and edit all of this shit…

In any event, this story, which is really more of a micro-fiction piece, is more of a William S. Burroughs type of tale. If you’ve read any of his story collections like Interzone, that will make sense.

This story, which as best as I can tell, was written by me sometime in 2008. That’s 17 years ago…Yeah.

It’s based on a real life guy, named Jeff Peckman, who claimed to have evidence of aliens on video way back in the early 2000’s. He presented the evidence to an audience on my old college campus and it made the news.

People made of fun of Peckman for years and for some reason, I wrote three separate pieces about him; two of them were news pieces and then there was this one, which is a weird short story.

I had to revisit the whole ordeal in order to glean the details of what I was trying to accomplish with this story. I tweaked it also to. hopefully, make it understandable to people completely unfamiliar with the story because in Internet years, it’s ancient history.

For example, in Peckman’s alien video, there’s a goofy looking thing that is supposed to be an alien but it’s blurred out and ridiculous looking and it jumps up into frame and looks around. At the time, one woman in the audience claimed it was legit and said that she knows this for a fact because only Hollywood could fake it that good. I incorporated details like that into my story.

Peckman is still around. He looks like “Doe” from the Heaven’s Gate cult. He made international news back then. He did the news circuit and some talk shows and he even ran for mayor in Denver, garnering almost 1,000 votes.

All of this occurred prior to the advent of social media as we know it now so it’s pretty amazing that it went as far as it did.

Anyway, this is my story inspired by the ridiculousness of Jeff Peckman. It’s ancient in Sarlos years and it may or may not make it into a book. I’m not sure it’s even any good but it is entertaining. The jury is still out.

Enjoy the weirdness.

• S/C

“There are people who want to kill me all around the world

I know about the UFO's
I know about the UFO's
I know some things I know I shouldn't know”

• All Around the World The Dead Milkmen