Official Edgar Rice Burroughs Tribute and Weekly Webzine Site
Since 1996 ~ Over 10,000 Web Pages in Archive
Volume 3613

WHO ARE THE SLEESTAKS . . .

AND WHAT ARE THEY DOING ON EARTH?
Ver 2.1
By Rick Johnson

The world is filled with anomalies.  Charles Fort collected records of these anomalies and thus brought the term “Forteans” (in Britain, they are called “Borderlanders”) into the language.

Very loosely defined, Fortean (or Borderland) phenomena includes anything that should not be.

 Flying saucers
 Dinosaur survivals in Africa
 Werewolves and vampires
Ghosts
Magic and sorcery
Zombies
Religion of every sort
Pterosaurs in the SW US
Bigfoot or the Yeti in Canada and Tibet
Psychic abilities
Divination such as astrology and Tarot cards
The Loch Ness Monster in Scotland
Etc.

Occasionally things drop from the list as science proves they really DO exist:

 Giant squid
 Gorillas
 Coelacanth
 Meteorites
 Deep sea tubes
 Silicon life
 Etc.

But some anomalies persist and their very nature drives them into the literature despite being ridiculed by the mainstream masses.
 Megolodons in the Pacific

 Caspak and Zealandia
 Dinosaurs in the Congo
 Tailed people in Pal-ul-Don
The Face on Mars
Human people on Barsoom
The Hollow Earth
 Pellucidar
Nagas and other underground sentient reptiles
Land of the Lost
Cylons

And some things that are considered to be Fortean and so mythic are simply things-undiscovered no matter what we do.

Vietnam.  After a century of French Rule, and 20 years of the US bombing, fighting, crossing every square inch of that war-torn land, and STILL we somehow missed that lost valley with hundreds of unknown species!  Makes one wonder at the possibilities of the existence of The Land of Hidden Men aka The Jungle Girl novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

If we and they could miss an entire valley, could a single city that wants to remain hidden be so implausible?

Perhaps Burroughs was more of a Biographer than the novelist that we think.

There ARE explanations, we just cannot prove them so we theorize.

Den Valdron theorizes that Humans on Earth, under great stress such as the brink of death, may occasionally release their Astral Body (presumably including the mental Body and Soul) which then transports to another world where it somehow creates a physical body to inhabit.

This explains how humans can exist on Barsoom when they are so obviously physically contrary to every other living being on that planet.  They did NOT evolve on Barsoom, they immigrated there.

Caspak is so completely contrary to any terrestrial evolution that it has been theorized to be an experiment in evolutionary biology by an alien race.

The only alien race known to experiment on humans are the Lyrans, the Greys and the Cylons, the first two being humans abducted as slaves by the Cylon-Reptoids.

And this is the gist of the theory.

It is impossible for any single creature to survive for 65 million years.  It is impossible for a breeding population of dinosaurs to exist in a land as small as Maple-White Land or Island of the Skull.  Therefore, the observed dinosaurs must come from some other place, perhaps as lost migrants from another universe or cavern Migration Route from the Hollow Earth.

Den Valdron suggests that the dinosaurs cloned by Ingen and described by Michael Crichton in his novels and films Jurassic Park and Lost World were obviously NOT created by DNA from Dominican mosquitos, but came from a dinosaur survival found on Isla Nebular, then cloned. The mosquito story being a red-herring to divert the competition and government. He also suggests that as giant arachnids cannot exist on Earth, they come from another parallel universe where their size is normal.

The Television Show Battlestar Galactica, gave us the story of a dozen human planets attacked by Cylon robots, with one surviving fleet seeking the 13th Human world.

If you frequent UFO conventions and sift through all the stories, a single history comes through. 50 million years ago a race of alien reptilians called Cylons discovered and claimed Earth. A couple hundred thousand years ago, they returned and grabbed a bunch of Hominids as slave labor.  They cloned these slaves, then cloned the clones until copy-degredation over dozens or hundreds of generations of clones transformed the original Hominids into the sexless Grays.

Realizing their mistake, the Cylons returned and grabbed a bunch of Cro-Magnons as slaves.  These were dumped on planet-Lyra where they revolted and fought a war against the Cylons.  The Lyrans lost and ran away to hide in the 12 stars of the Pleiades where they terra-formed planets or lived in giant space-stations or in a massive fleet of starships.

The Cylons learned from their mistake and created robots as slaves.  These cylon-robots revolted against the Cylon-Reptilians and the war continues to this day.

Both Grays and Lyrans are seeking assistance from Earth (we have the numbers they lack) to assist them in their upcoming war with the Reptilians.

Note: The reptilians still see Earth as their property and modern humans as an infestation to be removed or potential labor to be enslaved.

This happens a lot.  Some historical act makes its way into the local religion or storybooks and is passed down until someone reads it and thinks, “Wow! This would so make a really neat novel or movie or TV show!”  and so they modify it enough to avoid the lawyers and a new mythos is born, often forgetting the origin.

Next, we must accept that even the most honest documentary will lie to you.

Custer’s battle at the little Big Horn was originally described as a tragedy where the heroic cavalry was massacred by unlimited hoards of Indian Savages!  Custer, with his golden locks flowing, being the last to fall as he protected the Flag.

By the 1970s when civil rights for minorities were rising, the new documentaries about Custer told a different story.  One about Squaw-Killer Custer, dishonorably discharged from the cavalry for desertion, was incompetent enough to lead his men into an obvious ambush!
Today, the stories are different, but still ... untrue.

We were once taught in school how George Washington threw a silver dollar across the Potomac River and chopped down a Cherry Tree, being honest about the act.  Today, we are taught hat these stories are fable… but…
It is unlikely that any American biography of George Washington will mention that he committed treason against his lawful government and advocated the total extermination of the American Indian.  Political correctness causes even the most vigilant journalist to lie to save his job. (Consider that Dan Rather of CBS LIED for three years to the American People about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan simply because the US Government wished to hide that information from the American People, and the News media agreed!)

Plus any movie or novel, no matter how honest it tries to be, will fudge the truth to increase ratings and sales.

Consider the journal of George Challenger who followed Maple White into the Amazon to rediscover Maple White land.

He describes returning to England with a pterosaur egg which hatched and flew back to South America.

When his journal was made into the documentary film The Lost World in 1925, the technology wasn’t adequate to provide an accurate visual of the journey, so they did the best they could.  Then the directors felt that a single flying reptile rushing home to be anti-climatic so they changed it to a full-scale brontosaurus that decimated London until it fell into the Thames to swim home.

Then we have the problem of technology.  In the early days of television and cinema, the technology simply did not exist to tell the truth.  Often the fear is upsetting the public would cause changes (in early Westerns on Television, you never saw blood after the villain was shot!  Today that is all you see.) Consider Ray Harrihousen’s Stop-Motion dinosaurs used to bring the Valley of the Gwangi to the world compared to the CGI-effects of Jurassic Park!

The point that I am trying to make is that no one tells the truth.  Everyone lies.

 Sometimes we lie to make ourselves seem more important.
 Sometimes we lie to save the feelings of others.
 Sometimes we lie because memory fades over the years.
 Sometimes we lie because we are confused.
And sometimes we lie because we are unable to adequately describe that which is unknown to us.

Well, we don’t really lie!  We make mistakes.  John Carter was not a cartographer or scientist, a fact he mentions on more than one occasion.  He was a fighting man who was trying to describe events that had occurred years in the past, and entertain his beloved nephew as well.  So when he spent ten years on Mars, then ten years on Earth, then returned to Mars, the argument still rages as to if those ten years were Martian Years or Earthly years or both at different times.  Carter didn’t concern himself with accuracy, he was simply getting on with the story.

When I was kayaking the Dinosaur Caves, a freak wave washed me overboard.
Despite my attempts to reenter (I cannot swim) I failed…
 …until a 12’ Great White Shark brushed my leg.
THEN I was out of the water, over the boat and headfirst into the water on the other side!

It's a cute story and one I tell often…. but the truth is that that shark only seemed to be 12' at the time.  In hindsight, it was probably no more than three feet and more interested in finding a seal than some stupid kayaker who tasted bad.

Or the memory thing.

I am told that on day-one of the police academy, the instructor is talking to the class when someone enters the classroom, kills the teacher and exits, leaving the class shocked and wondering what to do.  Note that not one of these future police officers made any attempt to prevent the crime or chase the perpetrator.
The instructor them returns to life and orders the class to stop talking and to write down in detail exactly what happened.
The stories range from:

A black man shot his with a shotgun
A white woman knifed him the death.
A gang of three teens entered with baseball bats to bludgeon the instructor…

So can we blame John Carter from exaggerating a bit to entertain his nephew? And as Burroughs was trying to feed his family, can we blame him for enhancing the story a bit?  And when the John Carter on Mars film comes out, can we blame the producers for adjusting facts to sell tickets?

So, keeping all this in mind, how do we know the truth?

It isn’t easy.  Historians and Judges have wrestled with this dilemma since the beginning of humanity.  And in the end, we can only go with what sounds and feels right.

---

THE MERRILL INCIDENT

---

We must also consider that no event is isolated.  Often there are incidents that are contemporaneous in space and time, incidents that may affect or initiate the main act, or be totally irrelevant.

1n the early 1970s, a meteorite landed near Merrill, Wisconsin. Something in that alien rock caused the local spiders to grow to massive size, thus terrorizing the inhabitants of it town.
When this incident was made into a film in 1975 under the title The Giant Spider Invasion,  the budget and FX of the times were unable to properly properly capture the incident.  Plus, they needed a reason for the spiders and saw the meteorite as a convenient scapegoat.  Thus they did the best they could AND fudged the details to sell tickets.
One spider model was built around a Volkswagon beetle (you can see the headlights shining through the eyes) to face a police officer who emptied his .38 revolver into the beast, then, when the weapon was empty, sought to pistol-whip the monster!  Which promptly ate him!

Really!  I am a trained soldier and if I were facing a spider that large with even a M-16, I'd turn and run!  Maybe return with an Apache attack helicopter or a dozen men with flame throwers and bazookas!  I would NOT pistol whip it with an empty firearm when bullets failed in effect!

So what really happened in Wisconsin that year?

There probably WAS a meteorite impact.  But, was it causal or coincidental?   And how did that piece of rock cause spiders to grow so large so fast in violation of every law of biology and physics we know?

Another source implies some spatial rift opened (possibly initiated by the meteorite impact) which allowed the spiders to cross into our dimension from one where they were the large apex predators.  If so, was the meteorite impact a coincident and a convenient scapegoat?  Or did the Meteorite open a gate between Earth and ‘giant-spider’ Earth? Was the meteorite NOT a rock but a Gate opening and simply mistaken as a falling rock?
.
There were giant spiders.  But as to size?  It is unlikely that they were larger than a decent sized dog.  It is simply impossible for a spider to grow to the size of a very large automobile.

And what caused them to grow?  Maybe it was biological from the meteorite. Maybe it was chemical from the meteorite.  Maybe it was radiation from the meteorite.  Maybe it was something else. Hazardous Waste was commonly dumped into wilderness areas at that time and mercury is mutagenetic!  Maybe they are naturally that large in their own alternative-Earth.  In September of 2008, Robert Hood claims to have discovered the graveyard of the giant spiders so this may shed some light on the truth once the bodies are dissected as to if they are Terrestrial or extra-dimensional.

Now I’m not saying that spiders the size of an auto have-never or will-never exist.  I’ve seen a few strange things in my life.  I discovered a Diplovertebron (a dinosaurian amphibian) and a 3-foot long scarlet centipede in the jungles of Okinawa, so I’m willing to entertain the thought.  I’m simply saying that from what I know, I doubt that the spiders grew to more than a dozen pounds.  If they were immigrants, they could come from a world of low-gravity and high air pressure that allowed them to grow that large.  If so, it would be a simply matter of time (hours or days) before gravity and lack of atmospheric pressure of the Earth killed them all.

But I wasn’t there!  My only experience with Wisconsin was with the Air Force in 1977 and I caught Pneumonia in July while there so was otherwise occupied and could not properly investigate the incident.

And I'm not about to call those people liars.  I've had enough people call me that and prove that a centipede cannot grow to three foot length.  I will only suggest that when you are scared, things look bigger and meaner than they are (see my shark story). And I will suggest that a film producer might find the idea of an invasion of GIANT spiders to be more sellable than an invasion of giant spiders.  And my centipede WAS that large!  I was only a couple feet away when it turned, climbed the curb (it was easily as high as the curb) and crawled into the jungle.  So I had a lot of chance to study the thing and compare it to immediate references.

But!  If they grew larger, then something unknown to science was going on there!

I doubt that they did. But they might have!

Thus when I see a tail-dragging brontosaurus decimating London in a 1925 film which then swims to Brazil, I am suspicious, at best.  I am first going to assume that the producer added that footage to sell tickets.  If not, then I am going to assume that the technology of the time was unable to properly and accurately describe the beast.  Then I am going to assume that the people were so terrified that their imagination ran away.  Then I am going to try to make some sense and figure out what really happened.

But a part of me is also going to accept the possibility that there really WAS a tail-dragging semi-aquatic brontosaur running around London.  Possible, but not necessarily probable.

---

HOW CAN WE BE CERTAIN?

---

We compare it with other reports.

Modern paleontology insists that the Apatosaurus was strictly land-dwelling.  BUT…

Carl Denham, a decade later, described a semi-aquatic tail-dragging and very aggressive brontosaurus that he sighted on the island of the Skull in the Indian Ocean in 1932 or 1933.

Here is a second report from half the world away!  Sounds like there just may be such a thing.

Then the Marshalls who tumbled into the Land of the Lost in the early 1970s through a “portal” near San Francisco also described a tail-dragging non-aggressive brontosaur.

Three!

If it happens once, it is a hallucination.
If it happens twice it is coincidence.
If it happens thrice, it may very well be true.

Now I begin to ask myself, “Is this a separate modern species that evolved from the Plains Apatosaur?”  The ones on Isla Sorna and Isla Nebular were not tail-draggers nor were they aggressive!

Then I ask myself, “why does the same species exist so far apart?”  South America is a far cry from the Indian Ocean and there was never any physical connection between the two places since the Apatosaur/Brontosaur evolved.

In an earlier work (which is being revised into a series), I surmised that both Maple White Land in Brazil and Skull Island in the Indian Ocean were the terminus of a thousand mile migration route down into Pellucidar.  As is the Forbidden Valley in Mexico, Zanthodon in Egypt and a few others.  Den Valdron surmises that Isla Nebular is still another.

Here is another thought:

---

ASTRONOMY FOR DUMMIES

---

If you take a very large object, say about three times the mass of the sun, and allow gravity to do its thing, that object will compress itself into a very small ball.  That ball will be so heavy that it will warp space-time and essentially, fall out of the universe.

I recently watched a Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episode that describes this very well!
Homer was seeking a place to hide from his sisters-in-law and stepped through the wall into a universe where the ground was a checkerboard.  In typical Homer fashion, he got angry and threw a pointed cone away which pierced the floor, causing it to fall into a hole, dragging everything with it, including the bullets fired by Police Chief Clancy.
 This is a black hole!

   . The thing about a black hole is that as matter enters that hole, gravity isn’t as great and that small [former-sun] ball begins to expand again.  When it reaches a state where the mass is equal to the pressure, expansion ceases and you have a pocket-universe!

As more matter enters that black hole, the pocket universe expands to stasis.  If too much matter enters, the internal pressure exceeds the mass and the black hole’s pocket universe punches a hole back into the normal universe to form a White Hole in our universe!

IF, the entering and exit mass is equal, the pocket universe vanishes and you have a wormhole!

BUT, suppose you can somehow dump matter into a black hole then seal it off to establish gravity-pressure equality!  You would then have a pocket universe that you could do anything to.  You can terra-form it to crate your own universe.  Phillip Jose Farmer described a race that could do this in his Maker of the Universes series of novels.

And as this is a pocket universe outside our own, any place in that pocket universe will coexist with anyplace in our universe.  You can enter this pocket universe in London, then take a couple steps and exit it on a planet a thousand light years away.

Since Relativistic Physics states that hyper-light travel is impossible, this bypasses that problem to allow interstellar travel that is almost instantaneous!

You simply make yourself a pocket-universe, terraform it to match home, fill it with Gates and while all this is happening, you build a fleet of cargo-ships.  These ships are aimed at promising stars and when they arrive, at sub-light speed so we are talking thousands of years of travel, the ship scans the star for useful planets.  If it finds one, it drops a Gate, the Builders get a message that says ‘we found one’ and they step through the do whatever to the new world.

Or you put a crew into deep-sleep or stasis or whatever, and they wake up when the ship reaches a star and the crew does the work.  You begin with a Pocket Universe that has only one gate, your Homeworld, then centuries later, a second, then another until eventually, you have a pocket universe with dozens or hundreds of Gates leading to different times and worlds and even alternate realities.  A Grand Central Station with unlimited subways!

We are talking about a race that doesn’t just plan for their own retirement and screw the kids.  We are talking about a race that thinks a million years is short-time poor planning.

And what do we know about these pocket universes?

Land of the Lost is exactly this so an examination of the series reveals a great deal!

We know this because when the Marshall family described their life there to Sid and Marty Kroft, they left clues that match this idea exactly.

One time they found a parachutist from the future who gave them some binoculars while on the rim mountains   (LoL is roughly circular, surrounded by mountains with a river dividing the land).  They looked across the valley to see themselves staring back.  Another time they rafted downriver and ended upriver at the exact point where they entered.

This shows that the LoL is a closed pocket universe where if you travel to the edge, you will vanish and reappear on the exact opposite side.

It also shows that this pocket universe is very small, perhaps a few miles across for the binocs used were standard 8x35!

---

LAND OF THE LOST

---

What is the Land of the Lost?

First of all, that is what the Marshall family called it.  The inhabitants never gave it a name that we know of.

The basic history is this. Scattered about the Earth are Portals or Gates or Doors that occasionally open into the Land of the Lost.  There seems to be a Law of Conservation of Mass that requires the exit of a mass about equal to any mass that enters.  If you enter, then within a set time, days or months, an equal mass must exit!  This is to keep the pocket universe stable.  Too much mass enters and the Pocket universe ruptures, a Black Hole forms in the Pocket Universe, a white hole forms in Our Universe and everything in the Pocket universe is sucked into the Black Hole to appear as energy in Our Universe, only it remains energy and fails to integrate.  That's a polite way of saying that everything dies!

So the entry-exit mass requirement keeps the Pocket universe stable.

One episode shows the LoL having troubles that Enik, the trapped Altrusian, traces to the Marshall family entering, but without any mass exiting.  Enik manages to manipulate the LoL so the Marshalls exit as they leave to keep the universe stable.

The central river enters the Pocket Universe, crosses the LoL, exits and reenters at the origin.  A complete cycle.  Stand on one side, look across the LoL and you see yourself.  Energy and Matter are closed.

The sky is an illusion.  The sun and stars and moons move almost at a whim, the moons passing through their phases in days and sometimes hours.  Often the moons and sun will stop or reverse motion.  Thus they are probably projected on a domed ceiling like the face of a clock.

But where are the clock-works?

Inside the Pylons?

Scattered about the LoL at a regular pattern are Pylons.  Each Pylon is larger inside than outside and can be opened by a key.  Inside these pylons is a table with crystal controls.  Some pylons control time in the LoL, others the clock face, others the weather, and still others open Doors to other worlds and times.  But not too distant timewise.

But it also possible that the workings are underground and the pylons are simply the controls.

The pakuni and the dinosaurs appear to have been there for some time.  The sleestaks are comfortable with the dinosaurs, accepting an allosaur as Guardian of their Eggs.  All of the visitors that enter and leave are from within a few centuries of our time!  So I think that time travel to and from the LoL is restricted to a thousand years at most.  Maybe it is a safety factor built in or maybe it’s some Physical Law of which we are unaware.

The surface is a jungle and desert and mountains with one temple separated by the LoL by a deep chasm.  It is under this temple where the Sleestaks live but are able to access many pylons via underground tunnels.

Crystals power the LoL, giving light, heat, energy and occasionally, when the wrong types touch, destruction.  Some even cause sickness.  This last is important.

And who are the Sleestaks?  The degenerate descendents of the Altrusians, a race of Reptiles that built and maintained the LoL.  Altrusians are intelligent, orange-skinned reptiles with three fingers and light-tolorant. Sleestaks are larger and less-intelligent, green-skinned, two-clawed and light-intolorant.  As the Sleestaks enter and exit hibernation cycles based on temperature, it is clear that they are exothermic, not endothermic as are dinosaurs.

Enik believed that he had been transported into the distant past where the Sleestaks were his ancestors.
Later he realized that he had been transported a thousand years into the future and the Sleestaks were his degenerate descendents.

Den Valdron did an excellent paper on Sleestak Biology called Unravelling the Sleestak (currently not on the internet), which is well worth reading.

Something happened in that thousand years between the time when the LoL was operating properly and the current time when the LoL is breaking down.  On a number of occasions, the LoL requires the Marshall’s assistance.

On one occasion when the weather turns bad, the Skylons appear to indicate that there was a problem and to show how to repair the problem.

---

THEORY

---

Now I admit that I am guessing here but once I looked over my notes, a pattern seemed to appear.  So although I am guessing, it is a guess supported by the observed facts.

Long ago, the Altrusian Race of intelligent reptiles appear to have discovered how to turn a Black Hole into a closed Pocket Universe.

The Marshals traveled down the central river, exiting the LoL but instantly entering it at the other end.
Another time they stand on a mountain at the edge of the Lol, look across with 8x35 binoculars and see themselves staring back.
Enik informs the Marshall’s time and time again that for a person to exit, an equal mass must enter.  At one time, he manipulates the Doorways to force the Marshalls to leave so they can enter at an earlier time.

They created the “Land of the Lost” as a sort of Grand Central Station between other worlds and times and even parallel Universes.

 One episode shows an alternate Marshall family where their mother still lived.
 Another shows Holly in a Pylon that opens onto different planets and times.

Then something happened that decimated the Altrusians, causing them to become the degenerate Sleestaks.

Enik claimed that he came from the distant future, then changed his belief to state that he came from a thousand years in the past and that the Altrusians were his degenerate descendents.

Why?

I think this is what happened.

The Altrusians were one of a number of Reptilian races in the Galaxy.  Unable to break the light-barrier, they chose to use the Pocket Universe method to travel.  And since Time is a function of Mass and Velocity, they were able to cross time as well as space, providing that they kept the mass nearly constant.  It is possible to fudge this a bit… Bring a hundred kilos in and you may have a week or months before the Pocket Universe destabilizes to force that hundred kilos to exit.  The more mass you bring in, the shorter time you have to exit a complimentary mass.  This would allow an Altrusian traveler a bit of time to enter, walk to the next Gate, and exit.

Since it is in our nature that whenever we travel, we decorate like home so we don’t get homesick, I think the Altrusians did the same. I think that the Altrusian Homeworld (let's call it Altrusia)  was very similar to Earth in vegetation and animals and gravity and atmosphere and climate save they had three moons.

The Altrusians built their maintenance complex underground and kept the surface as a park.  They created a surface building as a landmark but placed it across a chasm to keep the tourists away.  They employed a number of Altrusian technitians to keep the place working, most of whom worked underground where the machinery was.

I think that they built a number of Gates on Earth.  Maybe the Earth-Gate was one of the first they found or more likely, it was a planet that resembled their Homeworld, Altrusia, so they stuck around.

So they began to import things from Earth to their Homeworld.  Plants, animals, valuable minerals.  And one of the things they brought were dinosaurs!  Everyone likes dinosaurs!

I think that a thousand years ago, the Altrusians were bringing across a bunch of animals and plants.  They may have discovered Caspak and collected dinosaurs from there or maybe they found Pellucidar and took some from the Inner World.  By the time they found Earth and established the Gates, dinosaurs had become long extinct save in certain areas like Maple White Land.

The Lost World series shows a number of temporal & spatual gates (San Francisco, England, Texas, etc) which implies that Maple White Land is linked to the Land of the Lost. Perhaps this is where the Altrusians got their dinosaurs.  It is clear that the tail-draggers are a far cry from the ones on Isla Nebular and Isla Sorna but similar to the early ones described on Maple White Land.

Regardless, they collected dinosaurs!  Really, who doesn’t like dinosaurs?  We like them and they ate our ancestors!  So imagine the Altrusians seeing a tail-dragging brontosaurus and thinking, “WOW!  I can so make some bucks putting this in a carnival!”

So they brought a lot of dinos and plants to feed them to the LoL pocket universe.  BUT… before they could move on, something happened!

Maybe they brought too much mass in too fast and couldn’t dump the excess fast enough.  Maybe someone touched the wrong crystals together.
Maybe a tourist opened the wrong animal cage.

Who knows.

An explosion of sorts happened that decimated the Land of the Lost and sealed most of the gates.  The Altrusians probably believed that the LOL Pocket Universe collapsed and moved on to other Pocket Universes.  So, abandoned, the Altrusian caretakers and tech-people moved underground to survive the catastrophe.  The Dinos got free and took over.  Then over the next thousand years, everything mutated and degenerated.

Rick Marshall believed that there was something in the soil that caused the earth plants to grow to huge size.
Jefferson Davis Collie III stated that the blue crystals made people sick.

Quick-breeding insects and worms at the Chernoble incident in Russia are growing to huge sizes!

So over the next few centuries, the Altrusians became poisoned by radiation and contaminated foods to mutate into the Sleestaks.

As for the dinos, we really don’t know how long a T-Rex or Apatosaur lives, probably centuries.  They hatch and grow to adulthood very quickly, then bone growth analysis on fossils shows that they stopped growing and continued to live for a very long time.  If so, you don’t need a breeding population of dinos in the LoL, you only need a couple pairs.

The original young that were brought in transit (really, would you transport an 8-tonne T-Rex when a baby would do the job as well and be safer and easier to move?)  would have grown to adulthood in an irradiated world, becoming sluggish with poison.  Then, a few hundred years later, the pair would mate and reproduce, those eggs reaching sexual maturity centuries later.

So rather than a thriving eco-system, the dinos of the LoL are simply an inbred and mutated version of their ancestors. It may very well be that the current adults are only three or four generations from the disaster.

The Sleestaks call Alice, the Allosaur, their protector god which implies that she has been around for a very long time.  Probably over generations of sleestaks.

Also after a few years, the radiation or ground poisons are decimating the Marshalls.  Every human who has entered and remained for too long has gone crazy!  By the third year, even the Marshalls are showing the effects for they have forgotten how to speak Pakuni.  When Rick Marshall manages to exit, he is replaced by his brother, Jack who takes over because the children are loosing their ability to function clearly.  All actions in the Third Year are unexpectedly ‘dumbed-down’ over their earlier acts.

Rather than being a coincidence that Jack entered as Rick exited, it appears that when Jack entered the SF-Gate, his mass FORCED Rick out to conserve mass.

In another few years, the Marshalls will be fast approaching Pakuni levels unless they leave.

It is also probable that the current crop are the last of their kind barely existing in a dying eco-system.  How many animals are seen by the Marshalls?

 Brontosaur, 2- one adult, one baby
 Allosaur, 2- one adult, one baby
 Tyrannosaur, 1
 Pigs, a couple of strange colored specemins that may not be terrestrial in origin
 Pteranodon, a few
 Coelophysis, 1
Triceratops, 2
Beetles, a few
A two headed Elasmosaurus-like thing, 1  (possibly an alien species released from stasis)
A fire-breathing dimetrodon-thing, 1 (possibly an alien species released form stasis)

That's about it.  No herds of anything!  Animal life in the Land of the Lost is nearing extinction. No wonder the T-Rex is grumpy, he’s never gotten laid and has no change to ever have young. He is the last of his kind.

But it is reversable!

Holly who invents an accurate sand-clock in her second year is reduced to barely being able to cook by year three. She no longer explores or assists her father and brother.
Then, as an adult, Holly is able to return to assist herself in saving her family.

But for the inhabitants of LoL, their clock is running down.  There is only one T-Rex left.  And unless Junior and Dopey are males, the Allosaur and Brontosaurs face extinction when these pairs die.  Even the insects move in slow motion.

Now, after a thousand years, the system is breaking down.  Without regular maintenance, the Pylons and circuts are shorting out and rotting away.  A pocket Universe designed to last forever is failing due to the Sleestaks being no longer intelligent enough to repair it.

And as it breaks down, the gates are opening at random instead of under direction. The one near San Francisco being almost permanently open!  And the mass-conservation devices are failing, allowing too much mass to enter and the earthquakes are the LoL’s reaction or an attempt to compensate for this excess mass and prevent a mini-Black-Hole. Or maybe the recent earthquakes are signs that the LoL Pockdt Universe is about to collapse.

---

GIANT SPIDERS AND THE DESTRUCTION OF THE LAND OF THE LOST

---

It is possible that there is a single Pylon that leads to an alternate-Earth where the arachnids conquered the size barrier.

Holly enters a Pylon that cycles between the land of the Lost, Earth, an alien planet that may or may-not be an alternate Earth and an alternate Land of the Lost.

Den Valdron has written a fascinating paper on this called The Menace of the Giant Spiders from Dimension X which should be required reading.  It is possible that the LoL Pylon is opening a door between Earth and the ‘giant-spider’ Earth which could explain the Merril incident as well as many others.  Insects and arachnids cannot grow to any size on Earth, BUT, they can cross-over from a world where they could.  And it appears that we manage to kill them off before they can do more than terrorize a single locality so we really don’t know.  Unless the LoL allows them to visit and wreak havoc!  Perhaps one of the Pylon-Gates that leads into ‘Dimension X’ is shorting with a Pylon that leads to Earth, causing these incursions.

It is entirely probable that within a couple centuries at the most, the entering mass of visitors will increase enough to open a Black Hole and destroy the LoL.  Or the connection will short and the Giant Spiders will enter LoL instead of Earth.  Such an incursion would decimate everything in the LoL, dinos, sleestaks, humans….  And their entering mass would increase the destability of the Pocket Universe.

It is also clear that when the Marshall’s left, someone believed them.  Sid and Marty saw the story as a means to make a TV series.

Rick Marshall, a US Forest Service Ranger, and his children go camping, and vanish!  Two years later, Rick reappears with a wild story about dinosaurs and intelligent lizards!  I suspect they considered locking him up and pulled his badge as crazy.

Then a year later, Will and Holly and Jack show up with exactly the same story.

Now, Land of the Lost shifts from a children’s television show based on a Fortean Phenomena into a possible Encounter of the Third Kind!  It may be a private company or it may be the government or, most likely, it is a UN group (William Blandings, the sun repairman, is British) that puts a lot of effort into finding a way into the LOL.  They eventually find it because Adult-Holly now is allowed to use the Pylon gates to return to the past and assist child-Holly to save their family.

What happens then?  People like Blandings are assigned to repair the LoL  for human use.  People like Adult-Holly are allowed to use the Pylons to travel to ensure that problems fail to materialize.  Other people use the LoL Pylons to visit the stars!

BUT…

…What happens when the Altrusians realize that the Land of the Lost was not destroyed but is being used by some hairless Pakuni ready to challenge their dominion?

---

REFERENCES:

---

BOOKS
Book of the Damned and Lo by Charles Fort
Jurassic Park and Lost World by Michael Crichton
Land of Hidden Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle

TELEVISION SHOWS
Battlestar Galactica, the classic TV Series
The Lost World
Land of the Lost

MOVIES
Valley of the Gwangi
Jurassic Park
Lost World (in all its incarnations)
Giant Spider Invasion
Land of the Lost

PAPERS
"Unravelling the Sleestak" by Den Valdron
"The Menace of the Giant Spiders from Dimension X" by Den Valdron
"Dinosaur Survival on Earth" by Rick Johnson

---