FIRST READ: ENTER THE SCEPTICS

Donald H Menzel. Flying Saucers. Harvard University Press/Putnams, 1953.

Yah boo hiss, here is Donald Menzel the first great pantomime villain of ufology, until that role was stolen from him by Phil Klass. In this first book Menzel sought rational explanations for UFO reports; in particular he was interested in the role of mirages, phenomena produced by ice crystals and other similar meteorological explanations. This didn’t exactly enamour him to the ETH supporters, which of course included the 11, going on 12-year-old Peter Rogerson, and I didn’t find his arguments very persuasive. After all I knew that flying saucers came from outer space because Aimé Michel and Donald Keyhoe had told me they did, and Michel had some impressive looking maths - which I couldn’t follow, but they surely proved Menzel was wrong.

 

Actually much of the time, Menzel was wrong, for like a lot of other people who think they have THE answer to UFO reports Menzel took his ideas far too far. Thus the Skyhook balloon that Thomas Mantell chased to his death was a mock sun in Menzel’s eyes, and he devised complex explanations involving mirages, although there were probably much simpler explanations.

 

But on re-reading I noted that he didn’t quite push the irage hypothesis as far as ufological folklore suggests that he did, and it is interesting to see that he was one of the first people to try and place modern UFO reports in a historical context - there are some fascinating historical snippets included in this book. There is, of course, the same literalism that also infects ETH believers. Thus Menzel argues the vision of Ezekiel was a sun dog, just as others have argued that it was tornado, plasma vortex, extra-terrestrial helicopter or a prevision of railway locomotives. That it is essentially a work of allegorical fiction is not considered by any of these authors.

 

I rather suspect that, every bit as much as debunking the ETH, Menzel was actually motivated by using popular interest in flying saucers as a hook on which to hang a study of peculiar atmospheric phenomena aimed at a general audience.

 

Within a decade Menzel had abandoned the mirages for a much more general sceptical approach, but they were resurrected decades later and in a much more extreme fashion by Steuart Campbell.

 

The section on life on Venus and Mars now looks very quaint indeed, with Venus being granted warm oceans and how the dark areas seen on Mars “have proved to be vegetation”. How many of our current scientific views will appear as naïve, old fashioned and just plain wrong in another 60 years’ time. – Peter Rogerson.

 

LIFE OF PSI

Rosemarie Pilkington (Editor), Men and Women of Parapsychology, Personal Reflections: ESPRIT Volume 2. Foreword by Nancy L Zingrone. Anomalist Books, 2013

This is the second volume of Rosemarie Pilkington’s surveys of aging parapsychologists, (the youngest is my age, several are in their 80s, and two died in the course of the writing), the first volume of which was reviewed HERE.

 

There are 21 people included in this collection, 15 of whom are American or have spent most of their adult life in the States, there are just three women; Mary Rose Barrington, Sally Rhine Feather and Serena Roney-Dougal. Looking through their biographies a few things stand out; one is how little conventional Christianity and its defence plays a part in their upbringing or their passion for psychical research, the main ‘spiritual’ impulse seems to be forms of eastern mysticism; the second is how many of them endorse claims that the likes of the Sidgwicks would have regarded as arrant nonsense.

It is interesting to see the same sort of radicalisation in parapsychology as we see in ufology, where once sober ufologists like David Jacobs, Bruce Maccabee and Bill Chalker start promoting radical claims and implausible individuals; in parapsychology we have Erlendur Haraldsson endorsing Sai Baba, Stephen Braude endorsing the ‘Gold Leaf Lady’ and various peoples’ backing of Uri Geller. There do seem to be charismatic individuals who can persuade people that they have experienced the most extraordinary things, and to be most unwilling to subject their claims to critical analysis. Many of these sorts of people use their charisma simply to get people into their beds or to persuade them to surrender their life savings, a minority use them to rise to the top in business and politics, but some use them to enchant people into believing almost anything.

 

On the whole the group represents a cross section of those interested in the subject from the eminently sensible such as Richard Broughton (currently president of the SPR and a welcome changing from some of the characters involved in that organization in the recent past) or Sally Rhine Feather, through to the slightly odd to the downright flaky. Some of the talk of spirituality is not to the taste of many of the Brits of my generation or older, and I can’t help wondering if some of the obsession with that and “nonlocality” and “connectedness” in the States is not a reaction to the very individualist official culture of that country. All this talk of spirituality can seem very uplifting and touchy feely, but as one contributor, Charles Tart admits, he didn’t know how to respond to a correspondent who argued that if you believe in nice spirits and so one, what about demons. Oops, that’s the reverse side isn’t it, bringing back demons and boggarts, witchcraft, the evil eye, curses and menstruating women turning the milk sour. It’s that thought which impels many people into groups like CSI(COP)

 

What is also evident is that the “paranormal” or “psi” are rather vague terms for a whole range of anomalous experiences or phenomena which may actually have no connection with each other at all. Why should anyone assume having a dream about your sister’s death on the night she died have the remotes connection with the mysterious appearance of water in a group of houses, or either with some anomalistic case of healing. Like UFO reports the only thing that connects these things is that they are investigated by the same people or within the same sub-culture. -- Peter Rogerson.

A GOOD GUIDE TO STRANGE STUFF

Roy Bainton. The Mammoth Book of Unexplained Phenomena. Constable and Robinson, 2013.

This is yet another of those monster books from Constable and Robinson that try to cover as much as possible, with the inevitable result that some parts are better than others.

For me the best part of this book was the one dealing with sea mysteries, because it is clear that this is a topic that Bainton, a former merchant seaman with multiple family connections to the fishing industry, knows and cares about, and his comments here are always critical and to the point. He provides an excellent summary of the Eilean Mor lighthouse mystery, exposing the myths generated by generations of writers from the poet W. W. Gibson to the American mysterymonger Vincent Gaddis. He shows

He also takes on the story of the Philadelphia Experiment and the mystery of the Ourang Medan, whose crew were said to have been found dead with a look of terror on their faces. It proved impossible to track down the ship, but Bainton wonders if its origins lay in the secret transport of nerve gas out of the ruins of Nazi Germany. Throughout this section he shows a willingness to concede where he has been taken in, in the past. He is also a poet, which shows in this little paragraph, which sums up the essence of the sea and its mysteries:

“Passengers on cruise liners, mistakenly thinking that they that they are spending their dollars on some luxurious floating hotel, will rarely stop to think between the changing shoreline scenery that below the thin steel hull keeping them afloat lies a deep, dark graveyard. Between this cemetery’s tragic, tombstone wrecks swim bizarre creatures; things with tentacles, singing whales, chattering dolphins, flying fish, creepy crabs and rapacious sharks, all part and parcel of a variety of earth’s biology whose fantastic limits are still unknown. Down there in the darkness the bones of men disintegrate, but the haunted sunken skeletons of their ships endure.” (pp.365-6)

There are some other really good portions; the critical examination of the activities of various mediums and psychics, especially those who go in for endless merchandising, and a lovely little piece on the cranky world of Cherie Blair; the legions of weird archaeology, and an excellent round up of panics and paranoia, covered with journalistic good sense.

There are some weaknesses; the section of cryptozoology is often reduced to half page features, that on Near Death Experiences relies far too much on Ms P M H Atwater (her “honorary doctorate” comes from something called Medicina Alternativa based in Sri Lanka, denounced as a diploma mill HERE.

 

The ufology section is rather superficial also, and I was surprised to see Bainton recommend the arch-credulous Tim Good (a guy who even now takes the tales told by George Adamski seriously) as a paragon of ufology. I suspect these problems are due to adding material on which he has not made much of a study to bulk out the work.

But the good outweighs the bad and much of this makes a good inexpensive introduction to Fortenea.

-- Peter Rogerson.

 

REMEMBERING DOCTOR DEE

Regular visitors to Magonia Review will have noticed that little panel on the right asking for donations to set up a permanent memorial to the Elizabethan magus, scholar, scientist, alchemist, mathematician, astrologer, and navigator, Dr John Dee, in Mortlake church, close to the house where he lived for much of his life and established his great library and alchemical laboratories.

 

After a long campaign by the John Dee of Mortlake Society, which involved a sometimes frustrating path through the seemingly Byzantine bureaucracy of the Church of England, we finally succeeded in our aim. Last night (7th May, 2013) Dee's biographer Benjamin Woolley unveiled a beautifully inscribed plaque commemorating the doctor's life and his otherwise unmarked last resting place in the church. This is, as far as we know, the only public commemoration of the life of one of the most influential figures of the Elizabethan era anywhere in the world, and as such is sure to become a site for all admirers and students of John Dee to visit.

 

The plaque was elegantly designed and cut by Emily Hoffnung, one of the finest letter-cutters working today, using slate from a Welsh quarry in a tribute to Dee's own Welsh roots. Here are pictures of the plaque in-situ on the wall, and Ms Hoffnung displaying the plaque before installing it in the church.

 

 

 

Many Magonia readers have responded to our appeal, both by direct donations and by purchasing the book John Dee of Mortlake by Nicholas Dakin, proceeds from the sale of which go towards the costs of the plaque, and we thank you for your generous support. Although the plaque is now in place, we still need to raise further donations to cover the total costs, and we invite you to join the John Dee of Mortlake Society, and to get involved in future events to celebrate John Dee. The next event for your diary will be the now-legendary John Dee Tea, on his birthday, 13th July, which Magonia has now officially designated 'John Dee Day'.

 

Just click on the picture of Dr Dee in the side panel for full details of the Society.

ART OF ALCHEMY

Stanislas Klossowski de Rola. The Arcane Doctrine Of Alchemy. Thames and Hudson, 2013.

The French alchemist Stanislas Klossowski de Rola is a delightful enigma. From being an aristocratic hippy-socialite and reefer-smoking roué of the 60s (friend of the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Paul Simon), he is now considered to be a serious scholar of alchemical engravings.

1988 saw the publication of his Florilegium, The Golden Game: Alchemical Engravings of the Seventeenth Century (UK translation published 1998). It was preceded by the current book, which was first published in 1973 in Thames and Hudson’s ‘Art And Imagination’ series as Alchemy: The Secret Art, more as a coffee-table book than anything. It took the form of a long essay on philosophical Alchemy plus a reprint of Eirenaeus Philalethes’ comments on the poetic ‘Vision’ of Canon Ripley (from his Twelve Gates), interspersed with dozens and dozens of alchemical engravings, mostly in beautiful colour. (This style of alchemical presentation is very much in the old tradition, with the process often being shown mainly through pictures. One book (the Mutus Liber) has almost no text.)

These images, at one level, are a coded formula for chemists but, at another level, they become meditation pieces for students of the philosophical/spiritual approach to Alchemy. The choice of images shows the author’s understanding of Alchemy. Though they are functional images and all are accompanied by notes explaining what part of the process they relate to, they also make a glorious gallery of alchemical mandalas. The French have always been more philosophical and astrological in their approach to Alchemy than the English-speaking world and Klossowski de Rola is firmly of that tradition. A few of the pages reproduce well-known, engraved sequences of the alchemical process but most of the book is given over to imagery, often exotic never-before-seen paintings and hand illustrations, copied from obscure manuscripts. The author, obviously, sees Alchemy principally in Art.
 

His essay focuses on the practical work with plants and dew in order to make a perfect elixir which acts in both the spiritual and the medical worlds. It is the philosophical ‘Gold of a Thousand Mornings’. Alchemy, for Klossowski de Rola is not about physical gold but about illumination.

The current reprint is enigmatic in that it is not an exact reprint. The title has been changed. The first book was large format while the new book is half its size. The text has been changed ever so slightly. Plates have been shuffled around and some which were full-page are now quarter-page. Some more general b/w plates (I counted around 6) have disappeared completely. The notes to the plates have been re-written and some plates have been re-scanned so that missing pieces of text at the top have reappeared but text at the bottom has disappeared!

The new edition feels tighter and more beautifully presented: the glorious colours of some of the plates seem more alive in a smaller format. But, in the older large-format book, more plates are full-page and the original (often manuscript) writings around the pictures are far more legible. If you want a beautiful alchemical read, the new edition has to be your choice. If you want to study every detail in the images, you would be better off with the old edition. Except that you can’t easily find the old edition anymore!

 

Though they are both firmly about Alchemy, this book is totally different, almost diametrically opposed in spirit to the Lawrence Principe book, reviewed below. Principe is a chemist and sees alchemical philosophy in terms of the mechanics of the Natural world and the product of the laboratory while Klossowski de Rola sees the process in terms of life-long magical artistry. Both scientist and artist are scholars of the same Art. -- Caroline Robertson

SECRETS OF ALCHEMY

Lawrence M Principe. The Secrets Of Alchemy. University of Chicago Press, 2013.

This is a book that every general student of Alchemy, and particularly those interested in the Western (including the Arabic) history of Alchemy, should own for it is, by far, the best book on the history of Alchemy ever yet written. No other book compares to it. The author, a scholar and a chemist, has been a student of the subject for 35 years and he has distilled his learning into this work.

 

It is not large (only 200 or so pages) and it is written in a lucid and simple style, almost as accessible as a coffee-table book, but it moves effortlessly through some 1400 (and more) years of alchemical writing, theory and practice, leaving no Stone unturned.

 

Lawrence Principe has built himself a formidable reputation as a scholar over the last two decades with his writings on the subject. Some books have been co-authored with another luminary, William R Newman (Alchemy Tried in the Fire (2002) and George Starkey: Alchemical Laboratory Notebooks (2005)) but he has steadily built his own body of writings too. They are all well worth reading.

 

Up to now, his emphasis has been on the Golden Age of British Alchemy, the age of Newton, Boyle and George Starkey (Eirenaus Philalethes) in the late 17th century, but, in this book, he extends his vision long into the past, to trace the development of alchemical thought from the Greco-Roman period, through the Islamic period and into the European period from the late Middle Ages onwards. And it is this historical overview which is the prima materia of the book: no other writer has come near the sheer magisterial depth and sweep of his research. The Islamic period, often ignored by other historians because of problems of text translation, is dealt with fully. It is not clear how many languages Principe has but, for the first two chapters of his book alone, Principe notes that he read 200 books, only 10 of which were written in English!

 

He places the roots of Western Alchemy firmly in the marriage of two things: late Egyptian scientific artisanship (from metalworking and the making of artificial gems to dyeing) with the Greek philosophies about the origins and structure of matter and Nature itself. From this marriage, mysteriously, was born the notion that, instead of just tingeing metals (making silver look like gold, for example), metals might be actually transmuted into other metals.

 

From these beginnings in the 1st to 3rd centuries AD, Alchemy developed through the Egyptian alchemist Zosimos of the early 4th century with the beginning of the method of expressing chemical processes through secrecy and the hiding of names, through code-names and dream imagery where writers ‘call a single thing by many names while they call many things by a single name’. And, also, we are introduced to the idea that Gnosticism (specific Egyptian Christian mythology and spiritual ideas) might have become fused with, or influenced, the Greek metaphysical principles behind the developing notion of the possibility of transmutation.

 

From Zosimos, the next major characters are the Arabic alchemists Jabir of the early 8th century, Razes (10th c) and Avicenna (11th c) until the tradition crosses into European culture around the middle of the 12th c. Now, the point here is that Principe is not doing biographical lists but is tracing the development of alchemical ideas as expressed by its main protagonists. We see, for example, how the concepts of elements and humours and atoms become integrated into the Arabic metallic philosophy of Sulphur and Mercury (and eventually Salt) and how, from that conceptual mixture and its application in the laboratory, emerges a new philosophical science.

 

Once into Western alchemy, the book becomes more exciting because the author, a Professor of Chemistry, can replicate the experiments of people like John of Rupescissa and then, eventually, those of Boyle and Newton and Starkey and, through meticulous decipherment of those enigmatic engravings which usually accompanied European alchemical works, unlock the keys to the ingredients and processes and, even, discover (to his own surprise)the mysteries revealed by seemingly unscientific procedures like continued circulation and cohobations at extremely low temperatures.

 

For this reviewer, the gold of the book is the description of Principe’s own work on Stibnite (Antimony), his trials and errors, until he finally reproduces that stage of The Work, which so fascinated Newton, of watching ‘trees’ grow inside the Philosophical Egg, as though the mixture were truly alive. As Principe says “My first reaction to this sight was utter disbelief and then – after becoming relatively certain that I had not taken leave of my senses – a sense of awe and wonder. Imagine, then what any chrysopoeian of the seventeenth century must have thought when he witnessed such a sight.”

 

There is a lot more in the book: too much to cover in a review. It must be read by anyone with even a passing interest in the subject. As well as the 200 pages of text, there are 36 pages of excellent notes and 20 pages of first-class bibliography. The author has said (elsewhere than in the book) that he wanted to write a work that would be readable by anyone but would contain the resource for anyone to research the history without overlaying obfuscation. That he has achieved.

 

Any reservations? Only one with regard to the book’s text. The author (being an academic) is very conscious of the light shone upon laboratory alchemy by modern scholastic and academic research, as though academics were the only ones involved in the field. He gives no credit (because he may not know them) to the hundreds or maybe thousands of alchemists working in the world, some of which will, undoubtedly, have taken the laboratory work far further than he has. And who knows how far?

 

And elsewhere, in filmed lectures (on Youtube), he seems to mock the idea that Alchemy, in any way, concerns psychic development or the ability to become personally as the gods. This flies in the face of the fact that the earliest Alchemy of all – that of the Chinese – began as Neidan (Inner Alchemy – a system of meditation and energy-mapping) and only later developed into Waidan (Outer Alchemy – involving the alchemical preparation of elixirs and other medications). It betrays in the author a modern, scientific-rationalistic dogmatism which runs counter to his often-made assertion that to understand the processes of the alchemists, you had to get into their mind-set.

 

Quibbles apart, buy this book, then buy a copy for your best friend too. It honestly is money well-spent. Those who live in London and who visit the British Museum may have viewed the ‘magickal’ display cabinet which houses John Dee’s magic mirror and his wax pentacles. In that same cabinet is a pen-knife with a blade half silver and half gold and the half-gold part is said to have been done by alchemical means. This book will tell you how to effect such a transmutation to the astonishment and delight of your friends!

 

It was a joy and a privilege to be asked to review this work. -- Caroline Robertson

BIG, BAD AND ABSOLUTELY BEASTLY!

Michael Largo. The Big, Bad Book of Beasts. William Morrow, 2013.

Having browsed through this book, I think I can say that the Komodo Lizard is the most disgusting creature on earth, but it’s a tight race. The Komodo’s bite is usually fatal, as it keeps it mouth full of deadly bio-toxins by chewing on faeces and eating rotting carcasses, as well as through its own bleeding gums. That’s quite apart from the venomous glands in its lower jaw.

Its family life isn’t much better. The newly hatched young instinctively fear their parents who view them as nothing other than food, so they head for the trees and stay up out of mummy and daddy’s reach (they’re too fat to climb) until they’re four years old and are better able to fight back.

After telling us this Michael Largo asks, with commendable open-mindedness “do they make good pets?” Although admitting that some have been trained to jump through hoops for food, he points out that they cannot be trusted not to kill and eat their owners. So that’s a ‘no’ then.

Not all the creatures in this fascinating compilation are quite so hellish, in fact not all of them are quite so real. It’s a nice mixture of mythical, semi-mythical, possibly, and definitely real. From the descriptions it’s sometimes difficult to tell which category applies.

The Hallucigenia is one such unlikely individual. A worm-like animal with “seven pairs of pincer legs, six sets of tentacles across its back, and a blob of a head without eyes, ears or mouth”. Its eating habits are suitably bizarre: “It is not know if the creature had small, chewing mouths at the end of each leg, or if the food it captured was handed off from one pincer to the next like a baton … and then inserted into an eating hole somewhere near its blobbish head”.

Just as well, I think, that the Hallucigenia was only about an inch long and died out in the Cambrian period.

Lots of our favourite crypto-creatures are here as well, the Jersey Devil, the Kraken, the horse-headed men of the Philippines, and the Mongolian Death Worm. Largo outlines the legend of the Death Worm and points out that although expeditions to find the creature have come back empty-handed (and more importantly with their hands still attached), locals are convinced of its reality.

However there is a creature called the ‘Bobbit Worm’ (I am not making this up, although I cannot be sure that no-one else is) that has a similar MO to the MDW: it lives in the ocean depths buried under the sand ready to leap out and slice any passing prey in two. These unlovely creatures grow up to ten feet long and live for over 100 years.

Our old chum the Griffin features here also, although Largo fails to ask, as he does for some other mythical beasts ‘is it real?’ Magonians, of course, know the answer to that!

But you don’t have to worry too much about the mythical creatures, as the real ones are as weird and anything dreamt up by the like of Pliny the Elder or fantasy writers from West London. Here we have the inch-long millipede with 750 legs; the Demon Duck of Doom (you’ll just have to read the book); the Balkan Bonnacon which defends itself from predators by aiming massive farts at its pursuers, and the Velvet Worm from the hotter and sticker parts of the southern hemisphere; the male impregnates the female by carrying its sperm on its antennae and inserting its whole head into the female. Don’t try this at home!

Lots of fun for all the family here and an essential book for anyone compiling pub quizzes or who enjoys Stephen Fry’s QI quiz show. Probably best with a PG rating though! -- John Rimmer

FIRST READ - ED RUPPELT

Peter Rogerson continues his personal reminiscences of the iconic UFO books of the 1950s that influenced the early generations of ufologists, and whose ideas still cast a long shadow over today's researchers and writers. 

Edward J Ruppelt. Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. Victor Gollancz, 1956. -- By Peter Rogerson

This was one of the first UFO books that I read in what was to become my long UFO book reading and buying career. It was taken out from Flixton Library, one of the many borrowed on my dad’s library tickets, as I found that the stuff in the kiddie’s library was for, well, kiddies. Flixton Library was a magnificent 1930s building, with lots of books, armchairs, a reading room and reference library, everything having a feel of scholarship and calm. How sad that it has now been relegated to an unstaffed room attached to a swimming baths! [It appears that the old library building is now used as the band-room for the Flixton Brass Band, so it’s still serving local culture. – JR]

Edward Ruppelt had been head of the US government’s Project Bluebook in 1952/3 and this book was the result of that involvement. It looks as though either he or his ghost writer chose to emulate Donald Keyhoe, and the book was written in the first person, almost diary-like fashion. For the not quite twelve-year-old schoolboy Peter Rogerson, I have to say it seemed dull compared with Keyhoe’s breathless prose. One reason was that it essentially covered the same ground.

A few years later I bought the Ace paperback edition, and at seventeen it had a rather different impact; it seemed to be evocative of warm summer nights in the American Midwest, where strange lights and silvery objects would skim across the twilight, redolent of space and freedom.

Edward J. Ruppelt

Looking back again, I see this as an attempt at a serious look at the subject as it was over 60 years ago. Many of Ruppelt’s tales were of strange lights seen by pilots, and of dramatic military encounters. Some of the things seen, from hindsight, were almost certainly experimental jet aircraft, unfamiliar to the lower ranks such as Ruppelt. The book contains accounts of classics such as the Lubbock Lights, which were probably reflections off low flying plover, though Ruppelt, having gone with that explanation originally, later claimed that he knew the real answer but was not able to reveal it. Years later this explanation turned out to be moths rather than plover reflecting the street lights.

Ruppelt did not go in for tales UFO landings in general. Indeed he claimed that these were all put in the waste paper basket; this does not actually seem to be true though. There is one landing report in the book, that of the Florida scoutmaster Desverges, who claimed to have been burned by a landed UFO. On investigation, his background began to look more suspect, and he did not help his story by adding more and more to it - in one version he saw a creature too hideous to describe, in another he fought three grey suited aliens. On the other hand Ruppelt found it difficult to explain burnt grass at the site.

Most people reading this book would have come to the conclusion that Ruppelt was leaning towards the ETH, though he clearly understood that there was none of the real physical evidence that would have been needed to allow an official endorsement of such a position. Ruppelt however felt that the answer would not be long in coming, “ I am sure that in a few years there will be a proven answer” coming from space research and various scientific advances.

But the ‘proven answer’ never came, and by 1958 Ruppelt was becoming more sceptical, his journalistic forays into the contactee world, constant badgering from Keyhoe and general ill health may well have contributed to this, as perhaps did the disenchanting effect of time and distance. The revised edition of this book (my copy of which disappeared into the vaults of ASSAP) published in 1960 took a much more sceptical line. By the time it was published Ruppelt was dead from a heart attack at the preposterously young age of 37.

Now nearly sixty years after this book was written, there is no ‘proven answer’. When I read this and other similar books in the mid-1960s, the idea that ufology would be around when I grew up seemed absurd. At that time I had become very much a convert to the ETH, and I suppose that I imagined that ‘They’ would have landed by then. Here we are, and still have no answer, and many of the once dramatic looking stories, with the benefit of hindsight, and what we now know of perception and memory, are much less impressive. The ETH that people like Keyhoe and his supporters in the Air Force believed in looks hopelessly naïve, its technology already that of a dead age.

We would be delighted to hear from Magonia Review readers about the books that first influenced their interest in ufology, forteana, psychical research and the other topics which we cover in this blog.