I was driving around Portland the other day, minding my own business. Then, while stopped at a red light, the driver in the car (not a van) next to me pulled up alongside, rolled down his window, and yelled out: “Are you Loren Coleman, who is on Coast to Coast?”

Thank goodness, he wasn’t in a clown suit!

I’m not sure how he recognized me from my radio appearances, but what could I say? One hardly expects such things to happen on a busy roadway, but, of course, shocked or not, I merely said, “Yep, that’s me.”

As it turns out, I’ll be on George Noory’s Coast to Coast AM again soon ~ on this Friday’s Halloween 2008 program, briefly, during the first hour’s news segment. Although cryptozoology may be mentioned, I will be mostly there to update listeners about the recent wave of “Phantom Clown” sightings. The strange potential child abductors have now shown up in Bloomington, Illinois, which is quite a few miles from the original Chicago area encounters.

Earlier in the week, Coast to Coast AM’s website mentioned my recent blog postings on the recent Phantom Clown accounts, and it caused a lot of comments to my Copycat Effect blog.

No telling what I’ll see out there on the streets after my Friday guest appearance.

Just a footnote again, it is in Mysterious America where I detailed the national wave of 1981 sightings of costumed sinister jokers in vans, trying to kidnap children, from Boston to Kansas City. I coined the term “Phantom Clowns” to describe them because they are seen but never caught.