I get tired of all those top 10 lists and New Year's resolution stories this time of year.

There's the top 10 local stories, the top 10 Montana stories, the top 10 AP stories, health stories, business stories and Dave Barry's top 10, too.

My question is, how can you plan ahead when you're always looking back?

The truth is, these top 10 lists are an easy way out when there isn't any "real" news. So to be a sport, I've made my own top 10 list for lack of other work.

Needless to say, it was a big year for local "otherworldly" circles, to include UFOs, Big Foot stories, and other oddities that don't get much publicity or get laughed at when they do.

You certainly won't find them on any top 10 list.

Lynda Cowen, a 1963 graduate of Powell County High School who now lives in Texas, discussed her recent docudrama, "The Secret of Redgate," this year, even though she filmed the movie last year in Deer Lodge.

She told me her film was inspired by her brother's own UFO encounters as a boy. The stories down in that small prison town are strange. I used to live there but I never heard any talk of UFOs. Back then, it was arsenic in the Clark Fork River and the local lumber mill that got all the attention -- that and the prison siren that sounded curfew at 10 p.m. every night.

"My brother consciously remembers having a lot of encounters with aliens as a child -- playing with them as a child," Cowen told me over the phone in March. "No one ever talked about this stuff growing up."

The film propelled Deer Lodge to the fore of Montana's most mysterious destinations. The film also won the "People's Choice Award" at the UFO Congress in Texas -- selected by 700 people from 15 films as a matter of fact.

This year's talk of UFOs was nothing new. Last year, Timothy Good -- perhaps the world's leading UFO authority -- came to Helena to interview Leo Dworshak.

Dworshak's book, "UFOs Are with Us -- Take my Word," shares his own alien encounter as a child. But what strikes me as strange is not Dworshak's alleged encounter but rather how Good, who lives in England, found out about it.

It seems that Good heard of Dworshak through a man named Lucius Farrila. And who's Farrila you ask? He runs a UFO news clipping service in Arkansas.

At any rate, even Art Bell's "Coast To Coast AM" was interested in that story. They called me trying to track down Good. I don't know if they ever connected though.

This year's oddities weren't contained to the sky; there was Sasquatch too.

In July, former Helena resident Matt Flanders, who moved to the Dark Side that is New York City, came home to film his new Bigfoot documentary here.

While researching his film, Flanders undertook a good bit of research by attending Bigfoot conferences in Bellingham, Wash., and the Salt Fork State Park in Cambridge, Ohio.

"I've interviewed so many people that have had these Bigfoot sightings," Flanders told me outside the Grandstreet Theatre one summer afternoon. "I'd describe them as people with an open mind and an active imagination."

Flanders said he met a lot of people around the country, including one man who communes telepathically with Bigfoot and another who studies the creature's genitals, his mating habits and his wish to live monogamously.

There's other stuff, too, that won't make anybody's top 10 list, except mine.

In November, I called Patrick Marsolek, one of the founding members of the Drum Brothers. He's made a name in Helena as a practicing hypnotherapist. I wasn't looking to be hypnotized, but rather to find out about this psychic stuff he does.

After all, Marsolek is the director of Inner Workings Resources -- a place where he teaches skills like remote viewing, intuition and trance exploration.

A few months back, he and Ellen Baumler, a local historian and expert on hauntings, led a "telepathic" tour of the Broadwater Resort in Boulder to see what, if any, residual energies remained.

"Everything we do leaves an imprint, or a field of information, or an energy that can be accessed," Marsolek told me in a November interview. "All the physical matter has an energy and a physical consciousness at its core. We're not separate from what we perceive."

In November, historian Jon Axline also gave a lecture, "Like Two Dimes in the Sky: The Great Falls Flying Saucer Film and the Cold War," at St. Paul's Methodist Church.

I usually talk to Axline about historic bridges and such, so when I read all about the lecture in the paper, this UFO bit caught my eye. He put it best when he said, "The more unusual (event) tells you a different side of the story. It shows people's fears during the time."

Our times are indeed new times. My hope is that in say 50 years or so, someone will read this and see that common people like me feared top 10 lists more than aliens.

Martin Kidston can be reached

at helenair.com">martin.kidston@helenair.com or 406.447.4086