Sev­er­al weeks ago, I post­ed an entry on the short sto­ry ‘Eight O’Clock in the Morn­ing’ by Ray Nel­son. The sto­ry was the ori­gin for the movie “They Live”.

Now, as part of main­tain­ing and mon­i­tor­ing the blog, I some­times check to see what search terms vis­i­tors are using to find the blog. Every so often, far too often to be coin­ci­den­tal, an entry for “ray nel­son” and “eight o’clock in the morn­ing” will come up. Its more than just once a week, its some­times even two or three times a day.

I checked Google, and the blog entry for the sto­ry appears in the first 10 entries (if I don’t count all of the par­al­lel or sub­sidiary Wiki entries) when search­ing for those terms. The first entries are for the Wikipedia entries for Ray Nel­son or the movie “They Live”, then anoth­er blog (which reprints the entire sto­ry) and Ray Nel­son’s own web­site appears before mine, so I guess that’s how peo­ple are find­ing my blog.

But that does­n’t answer the ques­tion of why. Why would so (rel­a­tive­ly) many peo­ple be inter­est­ed in a lit­tle-known author (I was­n’t real­ly aware of him until I researched “They Live”) and one of his short­er and less­er sto­ries, and why so con­tin­u­ous­ly? Is some­one teach­ing a class that ref­er­ences the author or sto­ry and stu­dents are doing a web search for infor­ma­tion? Is this some kind of strange web-search­ing ‘bot at work? Are the aliens mon­i­tor­ing the blog for signs of peo­ple awak­en­ing from their trance?

At least one inquir­ing mind wants to know.