D-O-R.

From Desert Oracle Radio, this is the Eldrich Republic.

Our new series, that's all about America's strange history and

uncanny folklore. I'm Ken Lane. Episode two, Thomas Jefferson's UFO.

Eldridge is a curious word.

Best known these days for describing a certain gloomy flavor of prose and poetry.

The American Gothic writings of H.P. Lovecraft, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, and Edgar Allan Poe.

You might call it the country's native tongue, the uncanny.

The word Eldritch goes back more than half a millennium,

with the oldest known usage in a poem of 1508 by William Dunbar,

master poet of Scotland.

There was Pluto, the Eldr Incubis, and Cloak of Green.

William Dunbar was a macker, the Scottish term for poet for bard.

He was the macker in the court of the Stuart King, James IV.

The king born at Stirling Castle in 1473 and battle slain on the 9th of September, 1513.

We don't know how Dunbar died,

or exactly when, but it was in relative poverty.

The fate of many a poet, Macer or not.

Dunbar remains a national hero of Scotland, and you can see a fine statue of him at the Scottish

National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, dressed in the Franciscan cowl and habit of his

religious order.

A descendant of this court poet, also named William Dunbar, but born in 1749, left his native

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