It's time for our journey to begin!
I've already written up a log for another Secrets & Mysteries tape that featured episodes on "Bigfoot" and "Witches" and pretty much all of that info is applicable here. For the sake of being redundant, I'll just make a few individual notes about the episodes on this edition, which included "Tornadoes" and "UFOs".
Tornadoes seems like a weird topic for a paranormal magazine show, but they are a very mysterious phenomenon even today, let alone in the late-80s. The idea of "Storm Chasers" who risk their lives to learn more about tornadoes was also a very popular topic and there were plenty of dedicated documentary shows on TV during the 80s and 90s. It became so popular that the movie Twisters was made! So, it's not that strange to see it pop up on a show like Secrets & Mysteries. In Search Of... did an episode on the topic as well in '78.
Interestingly, the UFO episode may include one of the earliest interviews with Whitley Strieber, who would've published Communion in the same year... if the production date of 1987 is correct. The show also features Budd Hopkins as the author of Intruders, which was also published in '87.
This video is released with a lot of the same inconsistencies as the "Bigfoot" and "Witches" tape. The series was re-titled Secrets of the Unknown for its VHS run, but some of the episodes still bear the original title, Secrets & Mysteries, either in the introduction or the end credits.
Still, this is a fun series and I hope I come across some more of them on VHS in the future! These episodes were released under the Blockbuster Presents banner, but my understanding is that the entire series had individual releases on their own.
You can find out more information about the series on Wikipedia.org.
You can find video clips of the intro and outro segments on my video archival channel, VHYesterdayS.
I've also uploaded the full videos for both the "Tornadoes" and "UFOs" episodes on the Internet Archive for archival purposes
