Someone named W. W. Gibson wrote a poem called Flannan Isle—it was to my memory the first bit of poetry I ever learned to recite.
    Though two men dwelt on Flannan Isle to keep the lamp alight;
    Yet as we drifted in the lee we caught no glimmer through the night.
     The two men disappeared from the remote lighthouse without a trace, leaving hastily, a half-eaten meal, a chair overturned. Now at about this time I saw The Beast from Twenty Thousand Fathoms and it became my favourite monster-wrecks-a-city movie for many reasons. It possessed the best dinosaur created thus far, and did all the scenes that would immediately become clichés in all other monster movies.
        Most people barely noticed that in the middle of the film, the monster attacks and destroys a lighthouse containing two men. The film, I observed, was based on a Saturday Evening Post story by Ray Bradbury and I hunted it assiduously. It turned out to be published in Golden Apples of the Sun as The Fog Horn—the tone of the lighthouse horn happens to imitate exactly the mating call of the Plesiosaur, a representative of which extinct species just happens to be passing by at the time. After 65 million years without getting any, the randy beast gets over-excited and wrecks the phallic structure, presumably eating the two men as a consolation for having failed to score on a sure thing. The inspiration for the story, Bradbury eventually admitted, was the poem, Flannan Isle.
        My first successful literary investigation—there might have been a time when only Ray Bradbury and I knew about this.