WORMHOLES AND WARP DRIVES

Allen Everett and Thomas Roman. Time Travel and Warp Drives: A Scientific Guide to Shortcuts Through Time and Space. The University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Ufologists who believe in the ETH point to claims that various developments and shortcuts might lead to faster than light travel. The two physicist authors of this book have been examining the possibilities for a good number of years, and present their conclusions here. This is not an easy read, and a good knowledge of physics is probably needed to appreciate the arguments in full, but the basic conclusion is that none of the suggested processes could actually work in practice.

They examine tachyons, sub-atomic particles supposed to always travel faster than light, and show how they might be able to send messages into the past in certain circumstances, which would create paradoxes of varying degrees of nastiness. It is by no means clear that this would be the case, or that one could transmit a tachyon back along the path one had been received from, though this idea causes problems over something called ‘preferred direction’. Tachyons have not actually been detected. (This was before the claims about superluminary neutrinos, but this now appears to be probably an artefact of the measuring process, and in any case these ‘superluminary’ neutrinos did not possess one of the main properties of tachyons, that of going ever faster as they lose energy.

They examine various ways of creating time travel through wormholes and warp drives of various kinds. Unfortunately these all involve having to have large supplies of exotic matter with negative energy. In the case of the warp drives it turns out that this would be the negative equivalent of the energy output of several galaxies, to say nothing of other more esoteric physical difficulties. Worm holes of various kinds all have what look like insuperable problems when the maths are gone into with due thoroughness.

Travelling back in time through wormholes of course leads to all sorts of weird paradoxes like being able to shoot your own grandmother and prevent yourself getting born, in which case you didn’t shoot your grandmother. One way out of this was to assume that the time traveller would end up in the past of a parallel universe, an interesting prospect. Oh dear, on close inspection it turns out that the process would actually rip you apart, subatomic particle by subatomic particle, each one ending in a different parallel universe. You couldn’t even send a message by Morse code into a parallel universe. All that could come out of a time machine is incoherent white noise.

There have been suggestions to build time machines using rotating cylinders, rotating laser beams and the like. Alas the said cylinders and beams have to be at the very least longer than the observable universe by hyperastronomical orders of magnitude, and probably would have to be infinitely long.

The authors also point out that while forward time travel by relativistic velocities is theoretically possible, that does not mean that it is practical proposition.

If these authors are right, then that really is the end for the ETH, and for time travel, visitors from parallel universes, brane hopping and etc., at least by any means we could remotely comprehend. One thing we can be certain of, is that it will not by anything resembling ultra high performance aircraft. -- Peter Rogerson.

DEATH AND CONCIOUSNESS

David H Lund. Death and Consciousness. MacFarland and Co, 2011.

A paperback reissue of the 1985 original in which Minnesota philosopher David Lund argues for the possibility of life after death. In the first part he argues for a theory of disembodied survival in a world of images, as envisioned by the English philosopher H. H. Price (not to be confused with Harry Price). This we might now call a virtual world. The analogy with dreams does not strike me as particularly persuasive, as dreams have a physical substrate in brain activity (indeed it is not impossible that within a couple of decades we may be able to decode dreams from brain activity and display them, perhaps even as the latest form of reality TV). It is difficult to understand how information could be gathered or stored without some kind of physical substrate, however strange.

Lund argues that the brain works (and perhaps exists to) screen and limit consciousness, an idea which seems a lot less plausible than the idea that brains and consciousness evolved to deal with the problems of survival. Like many such writers, Lund does not deal with the consciousness of non-human animals (maybe like Descartes, he assumes they are just automata).

The second part of the book looks at evidence from psychical research and covers out-of -body experiences, near death experiences, deathbed visitations, hauntings, mental mediumship (mainly of Mesdames Piper, Leonard and Willett), and finally a brief look at reincarnation claims. As always this tends to rely on uncritical acceptance of the stories told by psychical researchers and others; and the use of the testimony of people like Robert Monroe does not add to confidence. The ‘Chaffin Will’ case is included, though that is now suspected to be a fraud, and even if it were not, there is a perfectly logical non-paranormal explanation for it ( a back up will only to be discovered if the son who was meant to inherit died before his son came of age, to prevent the farm from being alienated from the family if the widow looked like she might remarry).

While some of the evidence produced by psychical research is intriguing, the thesis advanced by Lund is not likely to be the explanation for it, and the last quarter of a century’s advances in neuroscience make it ever less so. It’s revealing to contrast that progress with the stagnation in parapsychology. In what other subject is there constant reference to the evidence, work and personnel from over a hundred years ago? -- Peter Rogerson

SUPERNATURAL AMERICA

Lawrence R. Samuel. Supernatural America: A Cultural History. Praeger, 2011.

In this lively book. Samuel, the founder of a “consultancy to Fortune 500 companies”. traces how the paranormal has been reflected in the pages of the press and other media since the beginning of the twentieth century. We can see from this how media which once reported the work of respected workers in the field such as J. B. Rhine have gone considerably downmarket in recent years. Samuel takes a fairly neutral line between the sceptics and the believers, one suspects that his head is with the former and his heart with the latter.

As a conclusion he argues that belief in the supernatural is likely hard-wired into the brain, its how humans are, a by-product of our pattern making abilities. He suggests that parapsychologists (and by implication other anomalists) are making a mistake by trying to treat the subject through the mechanisms of science, and trying to ‘prove’ that ESP are whatever exists, rather, ‘the supernatural’ exists as a kind of a shadow of science, a sort of raw protean proto religious experience.

While Samuel is to be congratulated for mining a previously unexamined mine of material, the newspapers and periodicals (I assume) indexed on online data bases, this is one of the causes of the problems which afflict this book.

The trouble is that it is not, despite the title, a cultural history of  'the supernatural' in America. How could one write that without reference at all to the 19th century, the rise of Spiritualism (not Spiritism as Samuel keeps calling it, that was something else altogether, a French spiritualist religion now mainly centred on Brazil), the growth of New Thought, the impact of Theosophy, the role of the folklore of the many different communities that make up the US population.

Even in the narrower confines of ‘supernatural’ in 20th century popular culture there are major gaps. There is no mention of Fate magazine, the main conduit of paranormal experiences and beliefs to the mass market for years, the role of supermarket magazines like Saga, and ‘newspapers’ like The National Enquirer in the popularisation of the paranormal. There is little or no coverage of popular topics such as near death experiences, hypnotic age regressions, the popular cult of angels etc., the popularity of figures such as Carlos Castaneda, books like Jonathan Livingston Seagull, neo-Paganism, Wicca and women’s spirituality and so on. There is very little coverage of ufology

There are also a number of grammatical errors ('suspect' for 'suspicious' for example) and howlers - Queen Elizabeth I confused with Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, as being born at Glamis.

Of course, it might be argued with considerable justification that a genuinely comprehensive history of the paranormal in America would take many large tomes, so perhaps we should be content that this is an interesting account of changing attitudes as reflected, mainly, in a sample of the high brow and middle brow press.

UNWRAPPING AREA 51

Annie Jacobsen. Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base. Orion Books, 2012

This is a mainly straightforward history of the secret American facility known as Area 51, situated in Nevada. Much of the information in it was obtained from interviews with 74 individuals, of whom 32 lived and worked in Area 51. Other information came from official documents, some of which were recently declassified.

There is some fascinating material about the U-2 spy plane project, which was not declassified until 1998. Area 51 was developed to provide a suitable secret area for testing these aircraft. As the U-2s were to fly higher than any existing aircraft, the development process was particularly hazardous.

For example, as the Soviet Union was developing more powerful missiles, it was feared that the U-2s might be shot down after being detected on radar, even though they would be flying at up to 70,000 feet. So a special radar-absorbing paint was created and applied to several U-2s, even though this would appreciably increase the weight of the aircraft and impair its performance. In April 1957, a Lockheed test pilot flew one of these planes for about 90 miles without incident, when it suddenly spun out of control and crashed, killing the pilot, as the paint had caused it to overheat.

A strange side-effect of the early U-2 tests was a series of UFO reports by commercial airline pilots and air traffic controllers which "began to inundate" CIA headquarters. The U-2s were silver-coloured (later painted black despite the increased weight and danger of overheating, apparently) and, as they flew at up to 70,000 feet, whereas commercial airliners in the mid-1950s flew at between 10,000 and 20,000 feet, the pilots reported them as UFOs. As the U-2s were top secret, the commercial aircrew could not be told what they really were.

I don't know if there really were as many reports of the U-2s as UFOs as Jacobsen implies, but it is in her handling of the UFO topic that she goes completely off the rails. Most of the book is an interesting and well-written account of the development and testing of military aircraft, nuclear weapons and, later, the increasingly important drones.

Some reviewers have gleefully pointed out errors in the book, but it must be realised that she had to rely for much of her material on the memories of men who served in Area 51 many years ago, and such memories cannot possibly be perfectly accurate. Although some of the details seem fantastic, at least they are believable. However, as I (and others) have noted, her treatment of the UFO topic is, though "good in parts", rendered absurd by her assertions about the Roswell incident and alleged crashed or captured saucers.

These start with the well-known tales of Bob Lazar. Of course, some of the things which Lazar said were undoubtedly true, but Jacobsen also gives credence to some of the obvious fantasies, such as Lazar being shown a flying saucer, at a facility called S-4, and being told that his job would be to reverese engineer its antigravity propulsion system. There is also the story of Lazar being escorted along a hallway in S-4 by armed guards and being told to look straight ahead, but risking a glance at a small window in which he could see a small alien with a big head between two men in white coats. (That's how to keep your captive aliens secret, folks; just stick them in front of a window and tell people not to look.)

However, the real absurdity is the author's version of the Roswell affair. According to the story she was told, it was not a balloon rig which crashed, but a flying disc, which was not from another planet but from Russia. It was an elaborate hoax devised by Joe Stalin, and contained a crew of children, surgically modified by Josef Mengele. The children did not fly it; it was flown by remote control. The craft's propulsion system was unknown, probably some antigravity device, and the intention was that the children would be mistaken for Martians, involved in an invasion of Earth, and cause widespread panic. Inside the craft was an inscription in Russian. (I'll bet you didn't know that the Martians spoke Russian, did you?) Attempts to reverse engineer the craft's antigravity power plant either failed, or were successful but have been kept secret to this day.

No, I have not made up the contents of the previous paragraph. If you don't believe me, buy the book and read it for yourself. -- John Harney

A DANGEROUS GAME?

Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval. The Master Game: Unmasking the Secret Rulers of the World. The Disinformation Company, 2011. Review by Clive Prince

Ever since Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval emerged as the stars of the pre-Millennium ‘alternative history’ boom – which they largely created through seminal books such as The Sign and the Seal and The Orion Mystery – their work has had a subtext. Although the main thrust of their solo and joint books is the challenging of conventional ideas about the origins of civilisation and championing the case for an advanced global culture in the ancient past, they set this against a more eschatological, indeed apocalyptic, background. 1996’s Keeper of Genesis, for example, didn’t just argue that the pyramids and Great Sphinx of Giza are far older than conventional Egyptological wisdom admits, but also proposed that those monuments contain and encode secrets that are somehow vital to our own time, even hinting that it is all part of a greater cosmic drama.

But with The Master Game, H&B appear to have stepped well and truly out of the closet. The book’s subtitle promises that they will do no less than reveal the identity of the secret rulers of the world, and the accompanying PR release hypes it as ‘the ultimate guide to ancient and contemporary agendas that are fueling a new world order and a coming Armageddon’.

These buzzwords show the audience The Master Game is aimed at. Indeed, it will be interesting to see what the burgeoning conspiracy and ‘truther’ community make of the book. In general they are well disposed to H&B but this new book, while featuring all the usual suspects of conspiracy lore – Templars, Freemasons, and even the Illuminati – portrays them as heroes rather than villains, on the side of the angels (perhaps literally) in a millennia-long underground war between a suppressed ancient wisdom and the forces of repression and inhumanity.

H&B’s dense 600-page opus is a sweeping reconstruction of history centring on a 2000-year-old conspiracy, established at the beginning of the Christian era to advance certain spiritual and esoteric beliefs, which is still shaping world events such as the War on Terror, and which is part of a cosmic battle between the forces of light and dark. The beliefs driving the conspiracy derive from the pyramid age of ancient Egypt, linking with H&B’s back catalogue and, through it, all the way back to that lost civilisation of which Egypt was the heir. Heady stuff indeed!

So H&B have finally pinned their colours to the mast… Or have they? In fact, they are rather more circumspect than we’d expect from the blurb, routinely employing phrases such as ‘it is as if this is part of a great cosmic drama’ and ‘it looks very much like there is a secret order guiding these events’, while never quite declaring a firm belief in these things. And yet they obviously do believe, and passionately, otherwise what would be the point of the book?

The Master Game is riddled with a transparent disingenuousness – a kind of doublethink, or perhaps doublespeak - by which H&B seem to think that if they say something, but then say they haven’t said it, or that it doesn’t mean what it appears to mean, then they can maintain an image as objective researchers while still delivering their message to the world.

To take one of a host of examples, towards the end of the book H&B muse that the 9/11 targets may have been chosen for their Masonic symbolism: the major symbol of the 32nd degree of the dominant form of Freemasonry in the USA, the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, is a pentagon, and the twin towers of the World Trade Center may have been meant to represent the Jachin and Boaz pillars of Masonic lodges (left). The terrorists may therefore, H&B suggest, have been making a veiled attack on Freemasonry, reflecting the widespread belief in the Muslim world that the Brotherhood is an instrument of America and Israel (or vice versa). Their speculation is debatable to say the least, but H&B follow this with the declaration, ‘We know, of course, of the many harebrained conspiracy theories that followed the 11 September 2001 attacks, and we don’t want to add more fuel to the fire’. But haven’t they just done exactly that?

This desire to have things both ways produces circuitous statements such as: ‘Our primary objective in this book is to follow the traces of what we suspect may be a “conspiracy”, or something very like one, based on Hermetic and Gnostic ideas and originally formulated about 2,000 years ago.’ Is it a conspiracy (or ‘conspiracy’) or is it merely something that looks like a conspiracy – in which case what is it?

Later they state the book’s primary theme to be ‘the survival of secret traditions that have carried ancient Egyptian religious concepts and symbolism through time and lodged them in the Western heartlands of orthodox Christian power.’ That’s the crux of the matter. The transmission of traditions, ideas and beliefs from age to age is one thing; a secret brotherhood pursuing a specific agenda down the centuries is quite another. Yet they don’t distinguish between the two, and so present the resurgence of a tradition or idea as evidence that somebody is pulling the strings.

This lack of discrimination particularly dogs the first part of the book, in which they explore the long history of heretical Gnostic movements that surfaced in different periods and places, each time to be ruthlessly crushed by the Church. They begin with the last such movement, the Cathars of medieval southern France, and trace the ‘chain of heresy’ back – through Bogomils, Paulicians, Manicheans and others - ultimately to Egypt in the early Christian era and the fourth-century sect that hid the Nag Hammadi codices. H&B see the whole chain of events, from the fourth to the fourteenth centuries, as being directed by a single secret organisation, a ‘counter conspiracy’ formed to preserve the true form of Christianity in reaction to the emergence of the organised Church, which deviated from the original message. But they present no evidence for this other than the periodic revival of Gnostic challengers to orthodoxy and the circular reasoning that, if a secret society with such an agenda really did exist, then that’s the kind of thing it would have been responsible for.

Both sides in the long-running struggle believed they had the authentic version of Christianity and the other a perverted form, and so saw it as part of the great war between God and Satan, although naturally with themselves representing the light and their opponents the dark. H&B loftily declare that they are merely relating the history and that it isn’t their place to take a position on which side they think was right – but they immediately do just that! They squarely blame mainstream Christianity for pretty much all of today’s ills, accusing it of a ‘righteous sense of domination’ that lies behind our despoiling of the planet and the intolerance of other faiths that has blighted history, and fill pages with examples of the Church’s brutal and sadistic behaviour in suppressing the heresies. On the other hand they write approvingly of the Gnostics’ greater morality, respect for the individual and essentially egalitarian principles. I’m with them on all of this; I just wonder why they don’t have the courage of their convictions rather than posing as objective observers with no axe to grind.

In the second part of the book the story moves on to the influence of the Hermetic tradition in Europe following the rediscovery in the 1460s of the Corpus Hermeticum, after having been lost for a thousand years. they suggest that the fact that these texts were recovered a mere (!) 120 years after the execution of the last known Cathar was no coincidence, and neither was the speed with which the Renaissance Hermetic revival swept Europe after the rediscovery. Both are signs of the secret order manipulating events although, as usual, H&B leave themselves a get-out, writing (their emphasis), ‘It is almost as though some sort of system or “organisation” was already in place when the texts resurfaced that had both the will and capacity to exploit their full potential in undermining the established Church.’ They don’t consider that the Hermetica's rapid dissemination might have something to do with their rediscovery coinciding with the introduction of the printing press (nor notice the glaring flaw in their logic that, if a secret society of Hermetic adepts already existed in positions of power, why the books needed to be rediscovered at all).

H&B go on to suggest (or rather, being them, imply) that since important esoteric movements such as Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry emerged from the Hermetic tradition, they too were set up by the same shadowy organisation as part of its anti-Church, pro-Gnostic agenda.

Behind it all, though, ultimately lay the magical star-religion of the high point of the ancient Egyptian civilisation. The key chapter in this respect is Chapter 9, in which they compare the core beliefs of Hermeticism, Christian Gnosticism and Egypt as embodied in the Book of the Dead and the Pyramid Texts, and find them to be essentially one and the same. The parallels between the ancient Egyptian and Hermetic beliefs are, in my view, convincing – indeed, they miss out some important evidence connecting the Hermetica and the Egyptian religion – while those with Gnosticism are rather more strained.

As their reconstruction of history progresses, H&B see the presence of the Egyptian-Hermetic religion everywhere in the Western esoteric tradition, often on the flimsiest of grounds. Inevitably, they bring the Knights Templar into their grand scheme, on the basis that a Templar heritage was claimed by certain Masonic orders from the eighteenth century. The merit of those claims is never explored; they simply accept them at face value. (I’m one of the dwindling band that maintains the unfashionable view that there was a connection of some kind between the Templars and the origins of Freemasonry, but it’s not good enough simply to take it for granted, as H&B do.) But it suits their purpose, as thereafter anyone that uses a Templar symbol is taken to be an initiate of the Hermetic conspiracy who uses magical concepts from the star-magic of ancient Egypt.

Another example of this promiscuous use of symbols from different esoteric traditions comes when H&B propose that Christopher Wren and John Evelyn, in their rival proposals to redesign London after the Great Fire, both employed the principles of Egyptian magic. They triumphantly note that both men appear to have based their new street plans on the Cabala’s Tree of Life. But hang on! Isn’t the Cabala Jewish? A minor problem for our intrepid researchers: they note that a couple of decades earlier Athanasius Kircher had proposed that the Cabala actually originated in ancient Egypt – thereby justifying Hermetic initiates such as Wren using it. But even if H&B are right, all it shows is that Wren and Evelyn were influenced by contemporary theories about the ancient Egyptian religion, not privy to secrets handed down from Egypt itself. Their putative use of Kircher’s novel theory actually weakens rather than supports their case for a genuine initiatory trail from Egypt.

The analysis of Wren and Evelyn’s plans for London is part of another major theme of The Master Game, which dominates the last part of the book. One of H&B’s more plausible arguments for an ancient Egyptian influence on the Hermetica is the latter’s recurring concept of sacred cities designed according to magical talismanic principles – ‘occult urban planning’ as they call it – which they propose derives from the Egyptian practice of constructing temples and cities in accordance with their astral magic. They go on to argue that the same principles were employed from the seventeenth century onwards in the layout of cities such as Paris, Washington and, to a lesser extent, London – further evidence, they claim, of the existence of that mysterious secret organisation and the grand conspiracy. (It isn’t, of course: it’s simply evidence of post-Renaissance groups basing themselves on the Hermetic tradition.)

This gives Bauval, in particular, the opportunity to indulge in a favourite pastime, one that will be familiar to readers of his previous books: finding significance in the ground plan and orientation of buildings, in particular their astronomical alignments. As with his other claims, some – particularly those concerning the heart of Paris - seem to work and do indeed suggest that some architects and city planners were consciously working to a Hermetic or Masonic plan, while others seem rather more contrived.

However, past experience has shown it’s a big mistake to take their word for it. Indeed, the truly objective researcher will soon realise the need to rigorously check H&B’s claims in these areas; some crucial alignments and correspondences in their earlier books have, notoriously, turned out to be nowhere near as precise or unique as they led their readers to believe, often relying on a quite blatant fudging of the data. And while I haven’t had the time for this review to double-check these particular measurements, angles and calculations, there are some immediate signs that H&B are up to their old tricks.

To take one glaring example, in Chapter 19 they attempt to show that Wren’s St Paul’s cathedral was designed as an ‘intensely “Templar” talisman’. The sole evidence that they put forward for this is that its foundation stone was laid on 23 June 1675, a date apparently decided by Elias Ashmole, a famous early Freemason. They brush aside evidence that he actually planned the ceremony for two days earlier but delayed it because of the weather, as they discern a hidden meaning in the date. In 1675 England was still using the Julian calendar, while the rest of Europe was on the Gregorian – and by that calendar it was 4 July, the date of the Battle of Hattin, the Templars’ last major battle (and defeat) in 1187. The St Paul’s ceremony was therefore, H&B conclude, commemorating one of the Templars’ sacred days.

Not only is their reasoning questionable – would the Templars really have wanted to honour the anniversary of their greatest military disaster, the one that lost them Jerusalem? - but in any case H&B’s basic premise is just plain wrong. In 1675 the gap between the two calendars was 10 days, and this means that 23 June Julian was 3 July Gregorian. This basic fact, which completely undermines their case, is easily verifiable – even using the source (on Wikipedia) that they themselves cite! Such an elementary mistake – only too reminiscent of similar ones in their earlier books – hardly inspires confidence in their claims based on more complicated astronomical and calendrical calculations.

The book is written in H&B’s usual professional, fluid and readable style that carries the reader along, which certainly helps given The Master Game’s unnecessary length. They could easily have said all they have to say in half the pages, the chapters on the Gnostic ‘chain of heresy’ being particularly overladen with extraneous detail.

The reader is also encouraged to stick with the story by the promise, seeded throughout the book, that it is all building up to the revelation of a great secret – some contemporary manifestation of the Egyptian occult agenda – that is of momentous importance to the modern world. Although the bulk is devoted to the historical material, and only a couple of dozen pages to the modern era, the packaging and promotion of The Master Game make it apparent that this is what the book is really about. And it is here that their persistent desire to have things both ways – to say something while saying they’re not saying it – seems to move beyond a wish to maintain a veneer of objectivity into something much more bizarre and, frankly, worrying.

The book proper ends with a chapter on the influence of Freemasonry in the United States from Independence to the twentieth century, as displayed in public works and buildings from the Statue of Liberty to the Pentagon. So far, so good; few who have studied the subject will doubt that Freemasonry has been a factor in the development of the American republic, although opinions differ on how significant a factor and just what it means.

H&B finish by looking at Freemasonry’s influence on American government support for the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. They note that the two presidents who formulated and carried through the pro-Israel policy, Roosevelt and Truman, were both high-ranking Masons. They also note that the dominant form of Freemasonry in the USA is the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, which places an emphasis on the symbolic rebuilding of the Temple of Solomon, usually taken as an allegory for the individual Mason’s pursuit of self-perfection. But H&B suggest that, in the case of FDR and Truman, they – and by implication the Rite as a matter of policy – were attempting to bring about this reconstruction in a literal sense through the re-founding of Solomon’s kingdom, an example of the Hermetic ‘occult urban planning’ writ large. They also make much of the fact that the Israeli state’s borders lay between the very Masonic-sounding latitudes of the thirtieth to thirty-third degree (the highest grades of the Scottish Rite) clearly implying that events were contrived to make it so.

Immediately after having made this extremely contentious series of suggestions, H&B portentously declare that throughout their research they kept unearthing clues to something even bigger, but that ‘the revelation of what lay behind the veil was so sinister, so worrying and so misunderstood by so many, that at first we thought it best to let it be, to ignore it, to delete it from our thoughts lest we be branded as “conspiracy theorists”’. However, they came to realise that it was their duty to bring what they have found to the attention of the public.

They make their great revelation in an epilogue, itself entitled ‘The Master Game’, reinforcing its crucial importance to the book as a whole. What is it they have discovered? By now we’re primed to hear that the big secret is that the shadowy fraternity they’ve been talking about for over 500 pages still hold the reins of global power – that they are the secret rulers of the world H&B have promised to unmask - and are propelling the world towards Armageddon as part of the great cosmic battle between good and evil. But no. The revelation is that… extremist Islamists believe that Freemasonry is an organisation used by Jews and Americans to control the world, and is the latest manifestation of a Zionist and ‘crusader’ war on Islam. And their evidence is – wait for it - that’s what Islamist leaders have said in speeches, press interviews, on their web sites and in literature distributed in Arab schools, being so successful that millions of Muslims now believe it. Hardly the most opaque of veils or fruits of the deepest research - and certainly not something that justifies the soul-searching that the two authors claim to have gone through when agonising over whether to bring this to the world’s attention.

H&B rightly condemn the belief as a mistaken and bigoted smear that has made Freemasons and lodge buildings legitimate targets for terrorism in the eyes of the extremists. As they point out, suicide bomb attacks have already been made on Masonic lodges in Turkey.

But their condemnation doesn’t let H&B off the hook. Even by their standards this is a breathtaking piece of doublespeak. Have they forgotten that just pages before they themselves presented evidence for the involvement of American Scottish Rite Freemasonry in the founding of Israel, and that throughout the book they have insisted that Freemasonry, and particularly the Scottish Rite, owes its origins to the Knights Templar – the ultimate crusading order? Surely this can only feed the very belief that they condemn? While clearly not sharing the Islamists’ twisted conclusions about what the connections mean, H&B wholeheartedly agree that the connections are there. They have written a book that provides the fanatics with even more ammunition. Why, if they really believe their own warning about the danger that such theories put Freemasons in, have they even taken the risk of writing this book and adding more fuel to such a potentially uncontrollable fire?

H&B play their own game in this book, through that repeated tactic of saying something while denying they’re saying it. This makes The Master Game a deeply dishonest book. But that final twist turns it into a dangerous one.

UFOLOGY'S LIVING FOSSILS

Frank Soriano and James Bouck. UFOs Above the Law: True Incidents Law Enforcement Officers’ Encounters with UFOs. Schiffer, 2011

Carmen McLaren. UFO Conspiracy. Schiffer, 2011.

Preston Dennett. UFOs over New Mexico: A True History of Extraterrestrial Encounters in the Land of Enchantment. Schiffer, 2011

Austerity and nostalgia rather meet in the first two of this collection of books from Schiffer. This is ufology stripping down to its 1950s/60s bones, ditching much of the accretions it has accumulated in recent years. The first is by a retired police officer (or made redundant nearly thirty years ago,) and a corrections officer (i.e. prison guard) and presents a number of UFO reports involving police officers, including giving detailed transcripts. Of course, not being there and in the witness’s heads it is difficult to know what is going on in such cases.

The authors seem to think that coppers and screws are especially trained witnesses, but the life of me I cannot see why. Police officers are surely meant to keep their eyes firmly on the ground, looking out for antisocial teenagers, joy riders, drunk drivers, burglars and thugs who are their stock in trade. They are also actually trained to be rather paranoid, to see suspicious activity where there is none, rather than ignore potential trouble. I would have thought that the screws spent most of their time indoors looking after their charges and have absolutely no expertise in strange lights in the sky. Perhaps I am mistaken though and in the US they spend their time looking at the stars, while the various prison gangs spend the night stabbing and beating each other to death.

Their credibility is not enhanced by their taking at face values the Rendlesham stories of Larry Warren, the abduction story of Linda Neopolitano and Varingha case

Soriano has a video of something in the sky, which has been pronounced unexplained by Bruce Maccabee, who has also endorsed the faked photos of Ed Walters. I suspect that this implies that Maccabee is one of those ‘experts’ who is so taken by their own expertise and techniques that they are quite incapable of questioning them when they lead to obviously absurd conclusions, and get into the state of thinking that they are so brilliant that only a super-genius like Leonardo da Vinci could get one over on them. This does not mean that Soriano’s video is faked, but that analyses from more neutral sources would be of interest.

McClaren’s book is a real return to the ufology of the 1950s and 1960s. a large catalogue of “selected” UFO reports, the aim of which is not to persuade people that there is something interesting going on that needs study, but that UFOs are alien spaceships, that the US government knows this, and this is ammo to get them to “tell the truth” (i.e. confirm ufologists beliefs).

If this was a really careful, critical selection, then whatever the intention, it might demonstrate that there are indeed very puzzling UFO reports. There still may some in this book, but the trouble is that it is both careless and credulous. Thus we get one of the most exaggerated incorrect versions of the original Magonia story that I have ever seen, the Thutmose UFO story (exploded in the Condon Report more than forty years ago, the Byfield abbey UFO (a hoax,), the Sawbill occupant case (a fictional story written for a company magazine), the old chestnut of Oliver Larch (fiction based on a short story by Ambrose Bierce), the Mantell, Chiles-Whitted and Gorman classics rescued from the IFO files, the Vidal abduction (fiction), a completely inaccurate account of the Gill case (even the year is wrong!!), the Oldfield UFO film presented as a genuine UFO case, which was shown to be a refraction in a plane's window by the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World programme, by the simple procedure of restaging the flight and filming the same effect. To add to this he endorses Ed Walters. After this I have very little confidence in the accuracy any of his accounts.

The third book, that by Preston Dennett, though, I suspect, not intended as such, should be viewed as a collection of folklore. It simply gives by date and category, collections of UFO reports from the state. The first section, that of UFO reports is in many ways similar to that of McLaren, some of these reports may well be very puzzling, though others will, no doubt, be easy to discount IFOs. As seems to be the standard, the more dramatic stories are those reported years or decades after the alleged events. It is when we get into the realms of abductions, contactees and UFO crashes that we enter closer into the domain of pure folklore. Dennett’s attempt to square the circle of the various different accounts of Roswell is amusing, of course he never mentions that “witness” after “witness” has been discredited by subsequent events.

These books also reveals the curious love/hate relationship that Americans seem to have with their government. One the one hand it is seen to be all-wise and all-knowing, capable of doing anything, even investigating UFO reports and coming to a conclusion, but also as malevolent, engaged in vast conspiracies to hide the “truth” from the public. Instead of research, ufologists like McLaren and Dennett prefer Tea Party type populism. Needless to say anyone who disagrees with them is not just someone who has different opinions, or is even mistaken. No, they are paid agents of ‘the Government’ (always presented as monolithic entity and not as a collection of disparate individuals). In case Her Majesty’s Revenue shows an interest, I can confirm that I for one have never received a cent from the wicked old Feds.

They also seem to present an impression of the inhabitants of “land of the free and the home of the brave” as collection of milk sop wimps who cringe at the sight of a uniform. Brits of my old dad’s generation if told to keep silent by some guy in a uniform would have replied “****!!! off, I'm not in your ******* army now”, and told them that it was our taxes who paid jumped up little Hitlers like them their wages.

These books also show again that for many ufologists the subject is not an enquiry to find out what generates UFO reports, but a faith community. They ‘know’ that UFOs are extraterrestrial spaceships and that the US government knows this, they simply amass reports in other to convert other people to their beliefs. – Peter Rogerson.

FIRST READ: AIMÉ MICHEL'S 'THE TRUTH ABOUT FLYING SAUCERS'

It was a cold morning sometime in the winter of 1961/2 when I encountered this book, in one of those paperback carousels they used to have in all sorts of shops. In this case it was the local barber’s. After my haircut, I rushed home, got my half crown coin and went and bought it. Here it is before me, 50 years on, front cover detached and stuck on with several applications of sellotape, the pages browned with age. Not just my actual first UFO book, but my actual first real grown-up book. If any book set my life on its course, this is it.

A half-crown coin
of the type used by
Peter Rogerson to buy
his first UFO book

Michel was a good writer, he was also a cool one, not like the American writers who tended to get angry, and shout all the time about the conspiracy by the dreaded Airforce. Michel argued using serious technical or at least technical-looking language, illustrated with lots of facts and figures.

In this book he started off with the classic American cases, Arnold, Mantell, Chiles-Whitted, Gorman, Tombaugh, Hess, Hall, the Washington DC sightings, etc. He then went into the material from Europe and the Middle East, the later a reminder of what is now a completely strange colonial world, as remote from us as any alien planet. Cases were presented in detail and he attempted to calculate height, velocity, size etc. Classic ideas such ‘angel hair’ (if you remember that you are an oldie like me) and the Mariagne landing were introduced.


AIMÉ MICHEL

Much space was given over to detailed critiques of Donald Menzel’s explanations of UFO reports in terms of mirages; of course most of this, along with the anti gravity flying saucer propulsion theories of Jean Plantier, went over my 10-year-old head, but the general tone was very convincing, and even after 50 years, at times the rhetoric can draw you in. Of course, with a more jaded eye it is obvious that Michel was over-systematising and lumping together a variety of quite different things, most of which probably have a conventional explanation.

But at 10-plus I was hooked, it was obvious that flying saucers were spaceships from other planets. Maybe I would study them when I grew up, but then I thought that by that time, everything would be solved. Michel was clear that with a little more effort the answer would be just round the corner. 58 years after this book was first published in France, we are no further forward. Michel himself continued to support the ETH, but his ideas about it became much more sophisticated and his contempt for the sort of simplistic nuts and bolts spaceship ideas of people like Stanton Friedman was deep and severe. In the end he came to the conclusion that if one took the ETH really seriously, then there was no hope of understanding “their” motivations, concepts, technology etc., or even whether such words had real application to genuine ETs. He then gave up the subject shortly before his death.

FIRST READ ...

Tomorrow I shall post the first in an occasional series in which our chief book reviewer Peter Rogerson revisits some of the titles which helped to form his interest in the kind of topics we cover in Magonia. In the first article he reviews Aimé Michel's Truth About Flying Saucers the book which started him off on a lifetime's interest in UFOs. In later pieces he will revisit titles - some classics, some now almost forgotten -which introduced him to ghosts and hauntings and the wider world of the paranormal and psychic research.

I think we all have particular books which have opened up new avenues of interest, or have even changed the way we look on the world. In my case the book which changed my viewpoint had nothing to do with Magonian topics, so I will not be reviewing it here, but in case you're interested it was The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs. By coincidence that was first published fifty years ago.

If you have a title that was particularly important in influencing the way you began to think about ufology, the paranormal, psychical research, etc., and would like to write about it we would be pleased to hear from you. Use the ‘Comments’ link at the foot of this posting to contact us. -- J.R.