“You're travelling through another dimension -- a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's a signpost up ahead: your next stop: the Twilight Zone!” (Rod Serling))

During a conversation about various historical decapitations held at the height of the Ken Bigley crisis, a friend mentioned having seen actual footage of a terrible helicopter accident on the set of ‘The Twilight Zone’, occuring on Friday, July 23, 1982 during the final take of the segment directed by John Landis in a film produced by Steven Spielberg. (28) The vivid description he gave of the death of the lead actor Vic Morrow (Jennifer Jason Leigh’s father) and two children he was carrying at the time horrified me. Having heard nothing of this before, and conscious of my “success” in unearthing a plethora of supplementary evidence for the purpose of “re-creating” Columbine, I followed my friend’s advice that “you’ll be able to find loads of stuff on that incident online, probably even the video itself”, and began to get busy with Google while he retired to bed. Again, within a few hours, and with encroaching sleep deprivation, I had become completely absorbed in all manner of minutiae surrounding the history of the case, although this time without any audio or video to exacerbate the morbidity: I hesitantly opted to avoid downloading the footage when it appeared in one of the search results. In fact, the lack of concrete sensory “proof” fuelled my continuing fascination and deepened the sense of poignant importance I attributed to this tragedy.

Gradually, as I read widely varied reports on the incident, particular details began to increase in significance, activating distant recollections: 1982, a child aged 7, California. For no apparent reason I became extremely interested in locating the exact place where it occurred, turning to the comprehensively gothic ‘www.findadeath.com’; but even the obsessively geo-precise author of this website failed to get to the specific site, prompting me to probe even harder for further information. Another reference jolted me to attention: ‘Six Flags Magic Mountain’ theme park, the nearest large public amenity to the movie set; knowing I had been there as a child in 1981 or 1982 compounded the momentum of my search for the site. Obtaining directions from the current ‘Six Flags’ website, I embarked on a churning www.multimap.com aerial journey beginning in Anaheim, L.A. – recalling the Marriott hotel I stayed at – and tracking the Interstate 5 Freeway north, accompanied by the vivid mental conjuring of hot leather seats, green and white road signs, parched earth odour, “Don’t You Want Me” by the Human League, oranges bursting with juice and waterslide logrides. Finally, I came to hover over the general area of the Santa Clara river valley, and started to zoom into the geographically featureless landscape, establishing nothing other than the proximity of the film set’s location to the theme park. (29)

Realising I had been tantalisingly near to the scene of this incident – possibly within days of it having occurred and at the same age as the young boy (My-ca Dinh Le) that was killed – suddenly gave weight and justification to the time I had spent researching the context. A casual remark had initiated the process and yielded to a consuming inquiry of labyrinthine convolution, as I waded through the potentially enormous stream of peripheral detail, inhabiting the subject virtually like a hardened ‘otaku’. (30) The death of My-ca Dinh Le was an arbitrary, blank singularity at the centre of a swirling morass of information, inviting engagement and the pouring of additional speculation into the hole. My vision became selective, driven by the accumulation of facts pertinent to my subjective