THE STRIEBER ENIGMA

Whitley Strieber. Solving the Communion Enigma: What is to Come? Tarcher/Penguin, 2011.

If the book by Maloney was redolent of the 1960s, and that by Torres and Uriate was about a case from the 1960s ( reviewed HERE), the latest contribution by ufology’s answer to Carlos Casteneda is redolent of the 1990s. In fact it looks very much as though it is some manuscript or WPS script from that time, taken down, tarted up a bit with some more recent references and sent in to the publisher.

It is full of the fringe ufolore of the 1990s, implants (Strieber has one, but his is introduced by mysterious humans and not the grey meanies), tales of childhood abuse on military bases (Whitely now has vague memories of this), complete with swipes at the False Memory Association, crop circles and their amazing messages, as well as animal mutilations and the like. There are also hints at the hybrids (not yet fully developed, that will come I presume), along with one new motif, the dead alongside the visitors/fairies. I remember predicting that this would be a coming motif back in the late 1980s, and indeed being told of some actual cases, by Bertrand Meheurst at a conference in Leeds in 1991.

If taken at face value, Strieber’s stories suggest he is having so many anomalous experiences that it is difficult to know how he has the time to eat his breakfast let alone write books. It is not surprising then that the more cynical among the UFO community suggest he is nothing more than a bandwagon jumper, leaping on one fashion after another. If this is the case, on this occasion not only has the bandwagon long departed, but has now crashed and is lying in a heap of twisted metal.

Perhaps there is another way of looking at Strieber, that as a trickster figure and that the Communion series are a form of postmodernist fiction, in which the novelist Whitely Strieber has created a fictional character of the same name (as he did in his post nuclear apocalyptic novel Warday) who is given many of the experiences reported in the UFO literature and in the many letters sent to him; this being a way to promote his spiritual and religious beliefs.

Perhaps in some sense he is all three and perhaps more, someone who has so blurred the realms of real life, dream and fiction that there are no boundaries at all between them. Perhaps his ‘real’ self is now completely taken over by a character of his own creation, a sort of online avatar in the head. – Peter Rogerson.

DOWN MEMORY LANE

Mack Maloney. UFOs in Wartime: What They Didn’t Want You to Know. Berkley Books, 2011.

Noe Torres and Ruben Uriarte. Aliens in the Forest: The Cisco Grove UFO Encounter Roswell Books, 2011.

Mack Maloney’s book is another of those time warp affairs, a bog standard 1960s UFO book appearing some 45 years late. By that I don't mean that it was written in the 1960s, it looks as though it was written some time in the 1990s, as the latest war mentioned is the first Gulf War of 1991, but its style both physical (an 18cm paperback) and content styles are redolent of that period.

It is essentially just a collection of UFO anecdotes put together usually without any reference to source or the kind of investigation involved, so that stories which reflect actual events, however interpreted, are interspersed with what look like classic “my amazing adventures in the forces” tales told decades after the events. It is probably best applying the test, the more dramatic the story, the less likely it is to be true. In some cases sources are given, which doesn’t exactly add to the confidence. There is the amazing tale of the ‘Red Baron’ von Richthofen, the German WWI ace, and the flying saucer, referenced to that well know scientific publication Weekly World News (he gets the name wrong, calling it ‘World Weekly News’ and wrongly calls it a British tabloid). The WWW does not follow the usual tabloid approach of mingling fact and fiction, in the WWW its all fiction.

Though Maloney briefly deals with the Scareships of the 1900s and First World War, he clearly has never examined any of the studies by Nigel Watson, David Clarke, etc. Much of the work is devoted to the Second World War, and I rather get the impression that it is mostly taken up with material from Keith Chester’s Strange Company, (Reviewed in Magonia 96) only without the notes which allow you to work out what were genuine contemporaneously reported stories and which are the decades later “strange tales from the forces” tales.

Maloney has found that he had a bigger problem, there just weren’t enough UFO stories from war zones to go round, so by arguing the whole of the 1950s and 1960s were the cold war, he was able to add in some of the classic UFO stories from the 1950s, as well as Robert Hasting’s tales of UFOs over the missile sites. Is there even the slightest independent evidence for any of his tales?. We get the usual Jim Penniston version of Rendlesham, but at least Maloney is sceptical of Roswell and does not regale us with tales of abductions and hybrids

Unlike many of today’s UFO books, Aliens in the Forest features a case which was actually investigated, and not too badly by the lights of the times. It refers to a classic CEIII report of the 1960s. The INTCAT summary, though not entirely accurate gives a good idea of what it involved.

September 4 1964 2200 CISCO GROVE (CALIFORNIA:USA)

While hunting in the Cisco Grove mountains, factory worker Donald Shrum (28), became separated from his two companions, and found his expected route back to camp ended in a sheer drop. He was forced to retreat to a canyon with a granite outcropping, sparse bush and few trees. He briefly took refuge in one of these trees, when he heard what sounded like a bear crashing about. When the creature had gone, he got down and made three signal fires. Shortly after he saw a light, which he thought was a lantern, below the horizon. When the light darted up and over a tree he changed his mind and assumed it was a rescue helicopter. However it came closer and hovered without sound or motion, he realized it was something extraordinary and climbed about 3.5m up the 8m tall tree.

The light was white, 20-25cm diameter, and was accompanied by 2 or 4 other objects a regular distance away. The light circled the tree, there was a flash and a dark object fell to the ground, and he noticed a dome shaped object about 400m away. His attention was attracted by noises, as two figures emerged from the bush from slightly different directions. The figures seemed to be curious about the hoot of an owl. A third figure, moving in a noisier and clumsier fashion than the first 2, then arrived. Shrum climbed further up the tree. He now saw that the first two beings were about 1.6m tall, dressed in silvery grey hooded suits. The 3rd was a of darker grey, had no neck, two red flickering eyes, and a rectangular opening for a mouth, these features suggesting it was a robot of some kind.

The two humanoids then tried to climb the tree, one boosting the other up, but without success. The robot then proceeded to attack him with some kind of gas, which made him pass out for a few moments, then awake retching, He fired three arrows at the robot, which struck with a spark, then some of his clothing, which he set alight, his bow, canteen (which the two men examined with interest), and some silver coins, The attacks continued through the night, the men trying to climb the tree all the while. As dawn broke a second robot joined the first, they stood face to face and sparks flew between them, and the area became filled with the gas which rendered Shrum unconscious again, for some time.

When he awoke again, nauseated and suffering from exposure, the beings had all gone. He then made his way back to the camp, being found by one of his companions en route. Back at camp, he found the 3rd man had also nearly got lost, and had seen a large bright glowing light descend. Back at the scene he retrieved two of the arrows, the metal heads of which appeared to have been ground by a file.

The story was reported by Shrum’s family to a local astronomy professor shortly after the incident, and was subject to a perfunctory air force investigation. In early 1965, after reading an article by Donald Keyhoe in True Magazine, Mrs. Shrum wrote to him, which launched a NICAP investigation by Paul Cerney and others.

The authors have acquired Cerney’s archive on the case and conducted their own investigation. Various stages of these investigations are reported here and seem to be fairly consistent as far as memory allows. Fearing publicity Shrum refused to allow his name to be used. though it seems to have circulated through the UFO community for some time, Shrum blames the Air Force for this, but I doubt they were to blame. His full name was first revealed, obviously without his permission, by Ronald Story in his 1980 UFO Encyclopedia (the story is not republished in the in the 2001 2nd edition, so I assume that Cerney, whose notes appear to have been used by Story without attribution, complained). By 2004 it was already across the Internet.

Though Cerney’s investigation was not bad for the time, the transcripts show a fair degree of prompting and uses of terms like “the ship” by the investigators, revealing their belief in the ETH. They attempted to have the little remaining physical evidence, the arrow heads, analyzed, without success. What does, crucially, seem to be lacking is a detailed on site investigation, which should have involved staying the night at the site at the same time of year, to assess visibility, animal and human activity etc.

Like many such cases, this story is essentially intractable, unless you believe that extraterrestrial not only look almost exactly human beings (their description short beings in white uniforms is curiously reminiscent of those in several accounts of the April 1964 Socorro case) are accompanied by robots with more than a passing resemblance to Gort out of The Day the Earth Stood Still, and who are afraid of fire, then the ETH does not look like a plausible explanation. Like Barney Hill, Shrum seems especially afraid of strange eyes (like welders goggles, behind which some kind of fire lurked) on the creatures.

The story is almost certainly not a simple hoax. Shrum seems to have been genuinely traumatized by his ordeal. There is a chance he could have been the victim of some horrible prank, but I am not sure that is a good runner. Explanations must be dependent on the exact viewing conditions, just how much could he see by the light of a low fire on a dark night in the middle of nowhere.

Could the beings with strange luminous eyes and flat faces have been owls? - in the original reports they seem to communicate with hoots like owls. This is likely to be more than a straightforward misinterpretation, perhaps external events are acting as a template for dreams and hypnogogic imagery that continue to intrude, as the affects of fatigue, drowsiness, sensory restriction and anxiety mount. Without site investigation it is impossible to say whether such an area of explanation has any validity.  -- Reviewed by Peter Rogerson

THE INFINITY PUZZLE

Frank Close. The Infinity Puzzle. Oxford University Press, 2011.

Described is the scientific journey taken by particle physicists, leading from the 1930s to today's experiments at CERN, where the Large Hadron Collider is attempting to detect the Higgs boson – suspected of giving other particles the property of mass.

The book's title comes from a fundamental stumbling block encountered in the early part of the journey. When trying to develop mathematical models to encompass three of Nature's forces – electromagnetism, the Weak Force and the Strong Force – physicists found that the value of certain terms in their equations kept becoming infinite, hence showing that the equations were wrong.

Frank Close, the author, is himself a particle physicist, familiar with the scientific papers published over the years. In writing the book he has fleshed-out details of the discovery trail by contacting many of the subject's key players and recording their recollections of seminal moments, and reading unpublished contemporary notes. It's a major review that illustrates the degree of intellectual effort required in advancing the subject, the competition between different researchers, the way knowledge infuses groups, the desire to be first to publish an idea and how unclear it can be, with hindsight, who really was first. Umpteen researchers won the Nobel Prize en route to the World's biggest experiment, at CERN, whilst other, seemingly equally deserving individuals, were bypassed. Also, the name Higgs boson is itself a misnomer. As Professor Higgs modestly points out, the group that essentially proposed the field now known as the Higgs field included five others. But although not fair on them, it is his name alone that the media insist on attaching to the most sought after particle.

A fascinating and well researched book that explains advances in particle physics over the last 80 years or so, largely without mathematics, in the context of the undoubtedly great physicists and engineers involved. It will be of interest to those working in the field and anyone wanting to know the scientific history behind the Higgs boson. -- David I. Simpson

HITLER'S JEWISH 'PSYCHIC'

Arthur J. Magida. The Nazi Séance: The Strange Story of the Jewish Psychic in Hitler's Circle. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

It seems to be a characteristic of some of the more successful and charismatic stage magicians and mind-readers that they eventually believe their own publicity and start to imagine that they do genuinely have extraordinary psychic powers. Usually this results in nothing more that a severe dressing-down from sceptics such as CSICOP, but in the case of Erik Jan Hanussen (née Herman Steinschneider) this delusion had the most tragic result.

Hanussen was born in 1889, just fifteen minutes after his mother, Julie Kohn, was released from a prison cell. She had eloped with Siegfried Steinschneider, and her father had them arrested for vagrancy. Siegfried escaped from prison shortly afterward the birth, and traced his wife and son through the infant's crying. Or so it says in Hanussen's autobiography.

This autobiography, Meine Lebenslinie, also tells of how as a child he woke in the middle of the night, rushed to a neighbour's house and saved their daughter from a deadly explosion; leapt onto a farmer's cart and drove it away from a tree a moment before it was struck by lighting and helped capture a notorious criminal in Bohemia. At the age of 14 his elopement with his 45 year old cabaret singer lover was only frustrated by his father's unexpected return home, and later he worked in a circus, when one night the lion-tamer was too drunk to do his act, the youngster, with no previous training, walked into the lion's cage and subdued the animal with a blow across the face with his whip.

If you conclude from this that Hanussen's autobiography should be taken with a massive load of salt, you would be quite right. However Hanussen/Steinschneider did find work in circuses and variety shows across what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Posing as an opera singer, he made his way to Istanbul, where, after the company he was in went broke, staged a fake opera performance, and conned enough money to make his way back to Greece, claiming to be a famous Italian tenor. In the course of this he unmasked a phoney fakir who was stealing jewellery from the wealthy passengers. Of course, almost everything in that account should be prefaced by the word 'allegedly'.

Arriving in Berlin shortly before the First World War and buying a selection of conjuring tricks from a magic shop he began a series of jobs as singer, entertainer, waiter and conjurer at cafes and cabarets in the city. He also took his first stab at journalism, taking over the editorship of Der Blitz, a scandal sheet which makes today's tabloids look very mild indeed.

Soon after, the war broke out and Steinschneider as he was still calling himself, was sent to a nightmarish posting on the eastern front. Here he began a series of fund-raising performances where he started developing his 'mind-reading' skills. Eventually he was spending so much time away from the fighting that he became virtually a deserter. Thanks to a lucky meeting he was asked to perform in Vienna, and at this point he adopted the name Hanussen, posing as a Danish minor aristocrat. This enabled him to escape detection as a deserter, and distanced himself from his Jewish roots.

Under this name he performed at the Vienna Konzerthaus in April 1916, finding to his consternation that Emperor Karl and members of the Imperial Royal Family were in the audience. He gave a creditable mind-reading performance, using the technique of 'muscle reading' with members of the audience. Asked by a member of the Royal party to perform another show, he became an overnight sensation.

After a disatrous tour in the USA with a strongwoman act, Hannuson returned to Europe, settling in Berlin, where he began the most successful stage of his career as a mind reader and hypnotist, calling himself "The world's greatest hypnotist" and "Europe's greatest oracle since Nostradamus". Despite brushes with the law in Czechoslovakia and Berlin, his reputation, and fortune grew. In 1930, Hanussen was introduced to the Nazi Wolfgang-Heinrich von Helldorf, head of the Berlin SA stormtroopers. With antisemitism and political violence rising in the city, Hanussen felt in need of a protector within the establishment. With Helldorf's profligate spending, and Hanussen's growing wealth, the ever-increasing piles of IOUs that Hanussen was receiving from the Nazi felt like an insurance.

At this time, he was not only still hiding his Jewishness, but also seemed to be enthusiastically supporting Hitler's rise to power. He had started his own newspaper, Eric Jan Hanussens Berliner Wochenschau, a weekly which comprised of horoscopes, movie news, lonely heart advice and plugs for Hanussen’s own psychic salon, as well as adverts for his magical paraphernalia. But soon it began enthusiastically supporting the Nazis, giving its pages over to praise of Hitler as the coming superman and saviour of the German nation..

But as the rumours around Hanussen grew - that he was Hitler's astrologer and that the Fuehrer relied on his advice and foresight, which was quite untrue - his world began to crack. His Jewishness was revealed by a Communist newspaper; and eventually coming to believe in his own impregnability and his powers as a psychic he was loose-lipped with advance knowledge he had gained of the Reichstag fire. His pile of IOUs proved an ineffectual shield when the stormtroopers' guns were held to his head.

Magida looks carefully at Hanussen's alleged powers, attempting to define what - if any - were real, how his showmanship worked, what was rumour, what was fact, and what was sheer invention from the stories that surrounded him. Ultimately the powers that he had convinced himself that he wielded were shown to be shadows against the greater shadow that engulfed and destroyed. A fascinating, meticulously researched account of a life that stretched from the broadest farce to the darkest tragedy, and with lessons about power and belief that have a wider resonance. -- John Rimmer

HYSTERIA AND HYSTERICS

Andrew Scull. Hysteria: The Disturbing History. Oxford University Press, 2011.

Jan Goldstein. Hysteria Complicated by Ecstasy: The Case of Nanette Leroux Princeton University Press, 2011

In April 1602 a teenage London girl, Mary Glover, had a run in with a neighbour, Elizabeth Jackson, after which Mary, developed strange symptoms such as fits, a constriction in the throat, which made eating difficult, paralysis, swelling belly and etc. This led to the conviction of Elizabeth Jackson for witchcraft, for which she had to suffer a year’s imprisonment and several visits to the pillory. It also led to a fierce dispute among experts as to whether this was a natural disease occasioned by the wandering of the womb, or indeed the result of supernatural influence.

Two hundred and twenty years later, in the summer of 1822, “Nanette Leroux” (pseudonym) an 18 year old servant girl in the Piedmont dominated semi-state of Savoy was sexual abused by a rural policeman after which she developed symptoms including convulsions, lethargy, periods of mutism, periods of profound rigidity, and periods of somnambulism in which she re-enacted scenes of various kinds, including that of her assault.

The first story introduces Andrew Scull’s history of hysteria, which traces its often winding path from classical medicine's assumptions that it was caused by the wandering of the womb, through the rise of early modern medicine, through the age of 19th century psychiatry to the psychological battle scars of the twentieth century. The second is the subject of Jan Goldstein’s ‘microhistory’, which includes a full reproduction of the doctors’ reports.

In his book Scull traces the arguments between those who saw hysteria as a mainly physiological problem and those who saw it primarily psychological terms. The former included the French neurologist J-M Charcot, who ran the Salpetriere asylum which all the authoritarian élan of the ‘Napoleon of the Neuroses’, a term he took fairly literally judging by his photograph on p110! (left). The latter included his one time pupil Sigmund Freud.

They were united by one main thing though, the idea that hysteria was mainly a disease of women ‘the weaker sex’, though gay or otherwise ‘degenerate’ men may also suffer from it. This idea was only overthrown with the traumas of the First World War. Scull provides some graphic accounts of the circumstances which could lead up to ‘shell shock’ as it was then called. On no account should this chapter be read while eating!

Another common factor across the ages and interpretations was the harshness and casual cruelty of the treatments proposed. The surgical removal of the clitoris, multiple bleeding, Charcot’s circus-like exhibition of his ‘grand hysterics’, Freud’s treatment of Dora K, a teenage girl who appears to have been handed to the husband of her father’s lover as a sex toy in compensation, all the way to the grotesque treatments of the other ranks with battle stress.

Scull notes that after the First World War, grand hysteria disappeared, though all sorts of psychosomatic or possibly psychosomatic conditions survive, and are fiercely contested between those who see them as physical conditions and those who see them as primarily psychological. Examples include ME, Gulf War Syndrome and related disorders. See for example HERE  and comment.

Such debates tend to be based on a false dichotomy fuelled by an essentially dualist separation between mind and body. Today there is increasing recognition of mind/body unity, and given the probability that the unifying factor in also these hysterical syndromes is stress and what we now know of the effects of stress on the immune system, then it is entirely probable that such stress related disorders will include greater vulnerability to all sorts of viruses, bacteria and contaminants which might be otherwise harmless. It should also be pointed out that many “hysterical” symptoms can be seen in other animals under stress, suggesting that they are rooted in deep biological adaptations.

Some of these points come out especially strongly in Goldstein’s analysis, though her own analysis probably owes too much to Foucault and Freud. She does however position the case in his historical setting in counter-revolutionary Savoy, back under Piedmont’s control after previously being annexed by revolutionary France. ‘Nanette’ is a peasant girl who is servant in a bourgeois household, who has had a little more education than many of the girls of her class and time. When she falls ill she comes to the attention of Dr Despine, the Superintendent of the Spa in the main town of Aix-les-Bains. The good Dr Despine is a devotee of ‘animal magnetism’, the ancestor of hypnotism. Under his influence she develops a series of wild talents of the sort that would later be given the title “the higher phenomena of hypnotism”. These included telepathy and the ability to read with various parts of her body including her elbow and her nipples.

Her treatments at the hands of this doctor prefigure the exploitative performances produced by Charcot. These include an occasion in which, when she is bathing nude, various unauthorised spectators are allowed in to watch “the success of the treatment”.

A central figure in her story is a fellow servant Joseph Mailland, who becomes her ‘caretaker’ and note taker (words like ‘manager’ and even ‘’pimp’ come to my mind). He seems to occupy a sort of liminal zone between father and lover, with a definite bias to the latter. It is interesting how her symptoms abate when he puts his hand on her breast. He is a character in her various somnambulistic dramas (the later is quite literal, they really do involve little playlets), and is the testifier to some of her more dramatic feats. She can read his mind (on one occasion coming up with the comment which can be translated as “Babe you know I’m not the sort of girl who hangs around in bars!” Quite)

She decides that there is a sure way to cure her, or at least help her, that is for her to be bought a watch, a rare and expensive item at the time. It is hard not to translate this into modern terms - all will be well if you will only buy me a Porsche. She eventually cures herself (for a time at least) by masturbating to orgasm in the bath. Or so she says. The issue of the watch may give us the clearest clue as to what this might all be about, though I suspect the answer may be simpler than suggested by Goldstein’s rather complex hypothesis involving Nanette’s menstrual periods.

My reading of this story is as follows; in the beginning Nanette’s problems are an expression of what we would now call post traumatic stress disorder occasioned by the sexual assault, but there is more to it. The assailant as a police officer is an agent of the oppressive state, and it is not difficult to suspect that he may have used this to intimidate her, and to imply that she is nothing more than a village slut he can have his way with whenever he wants. This incident reminds of her position as being part of a oppressed age group in a oppressed gender in a oppressed class in a oppressed occupied state in a wider oppressed empire. She is at the bottom of the hierarchy, little Miss Nobody. She has been made to feel utterly worthless. We can thus see that the ownership of the watch is a symbol that she is worth something after all, she is a somebody, she has something that the other village girls do not. Here we see the beginnings of the modern consumer culture, where people’s worth is measured in terms of the consumer goods they produce.

The watch may also be a symbol of order, as Goldstein suggests, and it seems there is an element of taking control of her sexuality, as the semi sexual relationship with Maillard seems to imply. She is in control of that relationship, she determines how far he can go. Should he want to go too far she reminds him that she is not “that sort of girl”. Her cure by masturbation also implies her control over her sexuality, but it also implies something else, her turning the tables on the doctor and hangers on who have voyeuristically exploited and embarrassed her, she now sets out to embarrass him.

But sexuality does not strike me as the main source of her behaviours, the somatic disorders and subsequent learned behaviour start with quite another emotion, repressed rage, and the fear of where that rage might take her. Her periods of mutism echoes the silences imposed on the oppressed, and her fears that in revealing and denouncing the assault she might have said too much. The paralysis a way of preventing her striking back (at a biological level it represents the repression of the flight/fight response). The dramas she enacts act as a form of release, as do periods of altered states of consciousness. In her “normal” consciousness she takes on the role of the demure “proper lady”, she can be released in periods of altered states, which included hours of gaiety followed by tears, behaviour which resembles that of intoxication.

She may not be the sort of the girl who hangs around in bars, but she has other techniques of liberation, inherited from folk traditions of altered states.

As with the various patients of Charcot and others, Nanette, by being a ‘hysteric’ can become, at least a local, celebrity, then as now a way in which a working class girl could escape the prison of her environment, but as now, at the price of being the object of public voyeurism. The magic tricks such as reading with various parts of her body are clearly forms of

performance, but they also feature some symbolic aspects of ways of saying that she knows things that she shouldn’t.

Eventually Nanette marries, but when she becomes pregnant for the first time, her symptoms start to reappear, as she realises that being a peasant wife and mother is going to be far from a bed of roses. Was she seeking another escape, is so she failed for neither Despine, nor his correspondent and editor Alex Bertrand show any enthusiasm for renewing their studies. Indeed Bertrand is aware that many of her claimed phenomena have only appeared when she met Despine, and many were only authenticated by Maillard.

Perhaps the biggest enigma of grand hysteria is its disappearance, this seems to have coincided with the emancipation of women in the first half of the twentieth century, offering new escape routes. New media may also have washed away the folk culture which sustained it, and we should not ignore the possibility that some of its phenomena were the result of physical illnesses which were gradually eradicated though improved nutrition and sanitation. -- Peter Rogerson.

WRITTEN IN STONE

Richard Cassaro. Written in Stone. Deeper Truth Books, 2011.

The ancient megalithic buildings of the world are, for the most part, a mystery to us in the current era. From Stonehenge and Avebury here in Britain to the Pyramids in Egypt and Macchu Picchu in Peru, structures built with massive stones by methods that are fiercely debated today are the subject of puzzlement and curiosity. One the one hand, someone comes along and ‘solves’ what the structures do, only for this to be shouted down by the next theorist. Stonehenge is an observatory, but then becomes noted for its acoustic properties. The Great Pyramid is a tomb until it is suggested that it is a mechanism for transporting the Pharaoh’s soul to the Pleiades.

And so on and so on. From our vantage point in the 21st Century, because our science has achieved so much in a few hundred years compared to the thousands before spent travelling by horse and lighting our houses with candles, we now seem to feel it as an affront that we cannot solve every problem going, including that of what these enigmatic edifices, some incredibly old, were used for. Were they temples? Were they developed for something more intricate than that? Or were they, as quite a few folk writing today would have it, keepers of occult knowledge that can speak meaningfully to us even now.

I think that it is fair to say that Richard Cassaro falls into the last category. In brief, Written in Stone tells of a spiritual message that transcends time and is part and parcel of every major ancient civilisation that left large stone buildings behind. When this vital piece of information to humankind was covered up, firstly by Judaism then by Christianity, it was smuggled into the holy buildings of the latter by the mediæval guilds of stonemasons so that the enlightened could decode it. The stonemasons evolved into modern, speculative Freemasonry where, although the message itself was still transmitted from one generation to the next, the meaning was forgotten and has had to be rediscovered now.

Some gripes. Firstly, I found that quite a few of the pictures suffered from being too small. I have nothing against pictures if you can see what points they are trying to make. If you cannot then it is a waste of time, effort, ink and paper to put them in. Early on in the book they tend to crowd around the text in a breathless fashion, competing with the writing for attention. I personally feel it is much better to have either fewer and larger pictures or a bigger book. It may seem a minor point, but it had enough impact for me to mention it specifically. I find this is becoming a trend in books dealing with speculative archæology, and an irritating one at that. As I say, pictures are only of any use if they can be seen clearly, so I hope that this is something that can be worked on for the future.

It could have been trying to read around the pictures, but I also felt that the author was rushing sometimes. The presentation seems very busy, and (in his eagerness to impart his world view) he segues from one subject to another at speed. I would have preferred more time explaining fewer examples, but maybe that is a personal issue.

The next point to be made is about the Freemasons, and it is this. No-one, not even the Freemasons themselves, knows quite how they originated. They themselves have speculated that they were descended from the aforementioned mediæval guilds of stonemasons who came over from the Continent after constructing the wondrous Gothic cathedrals and went around Britain to spread their (possibly occult) knowledge by building ours. When they, or rather their descendants, had finished this noble and holy task they settled here and kept their secrets by admitting members of the gentry to their lodge meetings. Thus, everything has been preserved until the present day.

The trouble with this is that there is very little evidence for it, and some Masonic scholars even dispute this version of events. There are also plenty of researchers who are convinced that Freemasonry came about as the Knights Templar were forced underground in 1307. Richard Cassaro does not address the issue of the uncertain origins of the Freemasons. He just assumes that speculative stonemasonry spawned the organisation, with no alternative offered or debated. I have to say that, to miss this point out in a book that hinges on the claim that the hidden knowledge descended specifically from actual builders in stone to a gentlemen’s club with rituals is baffling, to say the least.

Having said that, the book does raise intriguing questions as to the spread of both spiritual concepts and architectural features in the ancient world. The author’s observation that the triptych (in this case one feature flanked by two smaller, such as a tower or a doorway) as being universal is rather striking, and something that does not seem obvious until it is pointed out. Then, it seems widespread and something that asks for an explanation, which leads us back to the book.

Richard Cassaro’s theory, however, that the concept of the dying and rising god/king was fairly common in Europe then, with the advent of monotheism, was diverted from its use as a tool of Hermetic wisdom and changed into an instrument of general suppression is fascinating. Certainly there were many gods who died and rose again, and they were worshipped around the time that Christianity was forming. The idea that our old selves “die” and we, spiritually, are “reborn” is commonly available today – ironically, especially in the notion of the born-again Christian. It was not the case in a Western world dominated by Christian orthodoxy. I will stick my neck out and say that it is a fairly safe assumption that Freemasonry, especially in the ritual of the Third Degree, has preserved the idea of spiritually dying and rising, so in that respect at least I concur with the author. However, I remain to be convinced as to the road that this knowledge took to get there. -- Trevor Pyne

This book may be ordered here:
http://www.deepertruth.com/store.php#ecwid:category=0&mode=product&product=6675290

HISTORY OF SATAN

Miguel A. De La Torre and Albert Hernández. The Quest for the Historical Satan. Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 2011.

On the face of it, this is not quite the same as writing about, say, ‘The Quest for the Historical Arthur’, which implies that there was a historical King Arthur underlying the mediaeval romances, as it is rather more contentious to suggest that there was a historical Satan. The authors begin with a chapter on ‘Satan in the Modern World’, a quick jaunt through legends that McDonald’s or Proctor and Gamble are in league with the Devil, Halloween, Satan on film (they assert that Hollywood means ‘Holy Wood’, an unlikely etymology which derives, I have been told, from a Terry Pratchett novel), the Church of Satan, alleged Satanic crime (they kindly refer to my own publication on this subject), the views of fundamentalist Christians such as Hal Lindsay (whose reputation does not seem to have been affected by the failure of his prophecy that “The decade of the 1980’s could very well be the last decade of history as we know it”), Catholics, and Liberal Christians who obviously take a milder view of the matter. After that they turn, not quite to the history of Satan, but ‘A Textual History’.

Probably the earliest references to Satan are in the opening chapters of the Book of Job, from which it appears that heaven was regarded as a celestial courtroom, in which God was the judge and Satan the prosecutor. (In those days you were not given a defence lawyer, neither on earth nor in heaven.) A prosecutor – the word Satan actually means ‘adversary’ - is not inherently evil, but, if one takes the view that we are all ‘miserable sinners’, then he is obviously someone to be feared.

Over the centuries many other concepts were added. Early in the sixth century (BC), the Hebrews were taken away to captivity in Babylonia. But in about 538 Babylon was conquered by the Persians under Cyrus the Great, and so they came into contact with the Zoroastrian religion, whose scriptures state that: “In the beginning, there were two Spirits, Twins spontaneously active; these were the Good Spirit and the Evil, in thought, and in word, and in deed.” Eventually, Satan would become identified with the Evil Spirit. This was quite different from the earlier concept that all things, good or bad came from God, as in Isaiah 45:7: “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.”

One passage that has created considerable debate is Genesis 6:2: “the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.” The ‘Sons of God’ were presumably angels, who are normally supposed to be sexless, so how could this be? The inter-testamental Book of Enoch explained that Semihazah, the leader of the Watchers (angels whose task was to watch over the universe) persuaded two hundred fellow angels to engage in sexual intercourse with human women, as a result of which they were expelled from heaven. The early church father Origen connected this story with a passage in Isaiah (14:12): “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!” “He rejected the notion that the passage could be a reference to the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar.”

Accordingly, Lucifer became the leader of the fallen angels, and was identified with Satan, though the latter was not mentioned in the Book of Enoch; among Christians the name Semihazah became forgotten. Ironically, Lucifer, which means ‘Light-bearer’, referred to Venus as the morning star, whereas at the very end of the Bible Jesus is quoted as saying that “I am . . . the bright and morning star.” (Revelations 22:16) Also, 2 Peter 1:19, in the Latin version, “suggests that the prophets of old are a lamp for light the way until Jesus as lucifer rises within our minds”, although the Authorised Version renders ‘lucifer’, as ‘the day star’.

In the New Testament, Satan appears by name, but also translated into Greek as Diabolos, which likewise means adversary, and whence we get the English word Devil. A vision of the future in Revelation 12:9 reads: “And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.” It may have been the phrase ‘the old serpent’ that led Satan to be identified with the serpent who tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden, indeed I have known people who believe that this is stated in the Bible, although in fact it is one of many features of Christian belief and theology which have no scriptural authority.

Though some Jews and Christians thought that the deities of the Pagans were simply non-existent, most held that they were real, but actually evil spirits deceiving the human race. The Greek word daimon meant a spirit, or a God. Accordingly, the word demon came to signify a devil.

The millennia from the rise of Christianity to the present day are treated in less detail, including such matters as Dante’s Inferno, the witch craze, and the justification of the colonisation of the Americas on the grounds that the indigenous people were in league with the devil, and hence engaged in cannibalism and bestiality. They date “the start of Satan’s death pangs” to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which, on an important Catholic feast day, killed four people out of five in the city, and destroyed almost every church. This made people reluctant to believe in God, and this had a ‘knock-on’ effect, since there can be few people who believe in Satan but not in God. Curiously, though, it was in the nineteenth century that versions of the Faust story became particularly popular, and the theme of the “Devil‘s Pact” is to this day common in ‘horror’ literature and film. In particular, we now have the novels of Frank E. Peretti, This Present Darkness and its sequel, Piercing the Darkness, the latter being the winner of the Evangelical Christian Publisher Association Gold Medallion Book Award in 1990 for best fiction.

Despite the book’s wide scope, there are one or two other points that I feel should have been included. According to Revelations 20:10: “And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever.” Yet, in later tradition, it was the devil and his minions who were responsible for torturing sinners, and there was never any suggestion that they were suffering themselves.

Some other remarks need qualification. They say that “the deities of the former ancestral faith . . . became the demons of the new Christian religion”, citing the example of the “resemblance of the Devil to the Greek and Roman god Pan, who possessed cloven-feet, horns, and goatee”. There is some truth in this, for instance the 1723 engraving of the temptation in the wilderness by Anthony Vitre shows the Devil as a sort of female Pan, with horns, goat’s legs, and breasts. But more often he had bird’s feet, scales, and claws, not really looking like anything in Pagan art. Moreover, these images were comparatively late, perhaps thirteenth century. The mosaic on the floor of the cathedral of Otranto in south-east Italy, which dates from 1165, simply depicts Satan as a man, though with a large forked tongue.

If I may indulge in some nit-picking literary criticism, the proof-reading leaves something to be desired: they say that Satan was mentioned “three times across two verses in Zechariah (3:11-12)”. The third chapter of Zechariah has only ten verses; they meant 3:1-2. There is a reference to “Swanson 2005, 13”, but this work has been omitted from the bibliography. Also, the index could be better, there is for instance no reference to Enoch, although he is important to the story. -- Gareth J. Medway

KEEP OUT!

Nick Redfern, Keep Out! Top Secret Places Governments Don't Want You to Know About, New Page Books, N.J., 2012

In this romp through stories mainly about alleged strange goings-on at secret bases, Nick Redfern lets the reader decide whether they are true, partly true, or just misinformation, lies and fantasies.
He starts with one of the best-known cases, the claims of Bob Lazar that he was employed at a secret base in Nevada, the notorious Area 51, on the task of investigating the workings of a fleet of alien spacecraft which the US government had somehow acquired. Lazar certainly had some technical knowledge and experience, but he also claimed to have received an MS in electronics from the California Institute of Technology and an MS in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but no evidence could be found to support these claims. Some of the things Lazar claimed were true and some were false, the resulting confusion giving plenty for believers and sceptics to argue about.

Those who believe that the US government possibly holds the secret of the saucers are also fascinated by Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Among these people was Senator Barry Goldwater, who wrote to a UFO researcher in 1975 stating that he had tried to find out what was in a certain building there.
Redfern informs us: "The building to which Goldwater was referring is allegedly a super-secret location that many UFO researchers believe houses the remains of one or more crashed UFOs, along with the cryogenically preserved remains of their deceased alien crewmembers. Its memorable moniker is Hangar 18."

One theory about the persistence of such stories is that they are encouraged by officialdom to hide research into new aircraft designs and weaponry. This is supposed to discourage serious journalists interested in defence matters from investigating because they don't want to be associated with a subject as disreputable as ufology.

Almost everybody who reads this review will have heard of the British hacker Gary McKinnon, who is awaiting possible extradition to the USA concerning alleged damage to NASA computers. Redfern mentions him in passing, as he has written about him at length elsewhere, but he gives more space to another British hacker, Matthew Bevan, who hacked into Wright-Patterson in 1994 and 1995 using a Commodore Amiga 1200, a computer that was primitive compared to those readily available today. However, Bevan got away with it, as the judge dismissed the case after the US authorities refused to supply the evidence to support their charges.

What puzzles me about such cases is why it was apparently so easy for such people to hack into US government computers containing lots of classified information. Why do the US authorities employ such incompetents to manage their computer systems?

The main theme of secret bases includes a chapter about bases on the moon, thought by some to have been built secretly by the USA (who else?). However, Ingo Swann used his amazing remote-viewing talents to determine that lunar bases were the work of extraterrestrials. If that doesn't seem incredible enough, it is true that Swann actually worked for the US government's remote viewing program, which investigated the possibility of using such talents (if they really existed) for intelligence gathering.

There are chapters on other topics, including one on stories of strange creatures, phantoms, and even cannibals haunting the London Underground railway system. This book is great fun to read, especially if you are unfamiliar with the topics discussed. -- John Harney.

Comments:
cda: I feel a comment on the Goldwater matter is necessary. As far as I can tell, Senator Goldwater once requested access to the Blue Book files at Wright-Patterson AFB, nothing else. This was during the period 1961-65 while General Curtis LeMay was the USAF Chief of Staff. Goldwater's request was refused (presumably by LeMay himself). In March 1975 Goldwater replied to a constituent who had asked him about UFOs and related this story of "ten or twelve years ago". Although Goldwater used the phrase "above top secret", at no point did he say he was trying to access bodies or UFO wreckage. He was merely trying to access USAF files, like writers such as Keyhoe and organisations such as NICAP and APRO. It was only years later that the Goldwater story mushroomed into rumors about artefacts and bodies, and a top secret room known as the "Blue Room". Tim Good, writing in Above Top Secret, talks about Goldwater trying to see UFO artefacts but not bodies or actual craft. Nick Redfern appears to See more...
By cda on KEEP OUT! on 05/01/12

Nick Redfern: CDA: You say: "Nick Redfern appears to take the story a stage further and talks about the senator seeking the remains of bodies and crashed UFOs, all supposedly stored in a secret building known as Hangar 18." Where the hell are you getting that idea from? Certainly not from my book, I know that much! Here are my exact words from my "Keep Out!" book as they relate to what I say in the book about the Goldwater saga: QUOTE: 'On March 28, 1975, the late and renowned Barry Goldwater – who served as a Major-General in the Air Force, a Senator for Arizona, the Republican Party’s nominee for President of the United States in the 1964 election, and the Chairman of the U.S. Government’s Senate Intelligence Committee - wrote the following, highly thought-provoking words to a UFO researcher named Shlomo Arnon: “The subject of UFOs is one that has interested me for some long time. About ten or twelve years ago I made an effort to find out what was in the building at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base where the information is stored that has been collected by the Air Force, and I was understandably denied this request. It is still classified above Top Secret.” 'Well, it’s certainly not every day you receive in the mail a letter like that – and from a U.S. senator and a presidential-nominee. Unless, that is, the subject-matter of the letter left a deep, lasting impression upon that same senator and nominee, which it clearly did.' END OF QUOTE. I made no specific statement - at all - that Goldwater was on the hunt for alien bodies. Rather, directly after referring to Goldwater's letter to Shlomo Arnon, I state in the book that UFO researchers believe the place Goldwater was trying to access is where alien bodies are stored, and that it has become known as Hangar 18. Saying some UFO researchers believe there might be bodies at Wright-Pat is very, very different from, as you word it: "Nick Redfern appears to take the story a stage further and talks about the senator seeking the remains of bodies and crashed UFOs." There's no statement in my book about Goldwater seeking bodies or crashed craft, only that this is what some investigators conclude.  By Nick Redfern on KEEP OUT! on 09/01/12.
 
cda: Quite right Nick. I ought not to have implied that you said this in your book (which I have not read). However it is true that some UFO extremists HAVE said this about Sen. Goldwater. I should have made this clear rather than extrapolating from John Harney's review. I am still curious who first used the term 'Hangar 18'. By cda on KEEP OUT! on 12/01/12