THE GHOST IN THE LABORATORY

Stacy Horn. Unbelievable: Investigations into Ghosts, Poltergeists, Telepathy and Other Unseen Phenomena, from the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory. Ecco (An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers), 2009. -- Reviewed by Peter Rogerson.

I rather doubt that Joseph B. Rhine the founder of parapsychology at Duke University would have really approved of this book. He wanted parapsychology to be a real science, which in effect meant the abstruse statistical analysis of what were, to be frank, mind-numbingly boring card guessing experiments. Not exactly the sort of material which goes into making a best seller, or a seller at all for that matter.

So Stacy Horn, whose previous work was on the New York Police's cold case squad, has to concentrate on the human interest, of which there is plenty in the mass of correspondence collected by DPL over the years, especially by Rhine's wife Louise. These spontaneous cases, tales of ghosts, poltergeists, telepathic flashes and claims of demonic possession, are probably a barely-touched mine of data to be excavated by future historians of American society and popular culture in the middle years of the twentieth century. Only a minority of such cases actually interested the Rhines, and certainly not ones about topics such as UFOs and such like. What did were stories such as the notorious Long Island Poltergeist, or the poltergeist story which was to form the basis of the film The Exorcist.

Apart from these spontaneous cases, there is the human interest of the interaction with others in the field, for example the attempts by Timothy Leary to get Rhine into his drugs culture, with little success, the antics of Peter Hurkos and Andrija Puharich, or the medium Mina ‘Margery’ Crandon etc.

It has to be said in all of this, Rhine remains an enigma, someone who never seems to come alive in these pages, almost a ghostly presence himself, but clearly inspiring others, to an almost equal amount of love and hate. It is as if even years after his death no-one really wants to speak too candidly for fearing that he will indeed come back and haunt them.

Though Stacy Horn introduces this book saying "every ghost story begins with a love story" and is about the survival of love, this is not really the case, though lost love usually inspires visits to the séance room. But what lies behind many ghost stories is not the hope of the survival of love, but fear of the survival of hate and rage, jealousy and vengeance, lust and hunger and endless despair. Ghost stories are dramas, soap operas of their day, and even now, self-appointed psychics tell these tales of blood and guts and endless vengeance, because that is what gets and audience going, and some examples are given here.

What to make of all of this? Stacy Horn, comes to no certain opinion, though she feels that it is the sheer implausibility of the "explanations" offered up by sceptics such as Mark Hansel, that provides the best evidence for their being ‘something in it’ which cannot be readily explained. Yet parapsychologists are no nearer to a solution than when Rhine started out to ensnaring that ‘something’ - or even really just hazarding a guess as to what it might be.

GHOSTS, WITCHCRAFT, DEMONS AND BOOKS OF MAGIC

Daniel Ogden. Night's Black Agents: Witches, Wizards and the Dead in the Ancient World, Hambledon Continuum, 2008.

Jeffrey R Watt. The Scourge of Demons: Possession, Lust and Witchcraft in a Seventeenth Century Italian Convent. University of Rochester Press, 2009.

Lynn Wood Mollenauer. Strange Relations: Magic, Poison and Sacrilege in Louis XIVs France. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007. (Magic in History Series)

For several tens of thousands of years, human beings lived in a cosmos that was perceived as organic, personal and malleable to the human will, for good or ill. Despite the rise of mechanical modernity, these beliefs still persist, and not just in the rural backwaters beloved of romantic folklorists. These books give insights into the this world.

The supernatural world protracted by Daniel Ogden, that of ancient Greece, and especially Rome, is one in some ways quite alien to us, but in another way its echoes still resound. It is a bleak and savage place, reflecting a civilisation that sense it could so easily be pulled back into the wilderness. Its supernaturals, shape shifters, body eaters and soul devours, seem to exist on the frontier between wilderness and habitat, hence one of their main tricks is turning people into animals and back again. There is, says Ogden, "something of the arena" especially in Roman supernatural lore. Their ghosts are not the weightless, translucent largely ‘imaginary’ creatures of modern psychical research, they are more like vampires, palpable creatures who can make love and war, and whose realm is just another country, with its border crossing ferryman.

Lynn Wood Mollenauer shows in her study of the ‘Affair of the Poisons‘, even when invoking demons, grimoires were imbedded in the Christian culture of the period. The demons, symbols of ultimate wildness and rebellion, were to be summoned up by and bent to the will of the sorcerer-priest, representative of the habitat of Christian civilisation. These demons were to be domesticated, turned into beasts of burden and slaves. This was done with words, the products of the articulate language which creates human culture and separates human beings from wild nature. The Word is the Habitat.
Despite this diversification, the old grimoires survive, and Davies traces their numerous re-publications, and down-market descents. In parts of Africa and the Caribbean, the mystical West, the works of the American William Lauron Delaurence, part con-artist, part genuine idealist and pioneer of racial equality in a very hostile time, have the same iconic value as various representatives of the ‘mystic East’ have in the west. There is nothing new in this, as witness the charisma of the eastern mages in the classical world, discussed by Ogden. Almost by accident, these two books on magic, demonstrate just how fictive notions of cultural purity really are. We have long lived in a globalised world; how very old the ‘New Age’ really is.

Jeffrey Watt's study of possession in the convent of Santa Chirara, takes from these global concerns down to a micro community, the closed world of the nunnery and its tensions and jealousies, and to a world too like our own for comfort. What was once seen as magic we now see as sexual abuse, verbal bullying and psychogenic illness.There is the priest who preys on, rather than prays for, young nuns, the Princess-Abbess, who rules the place like a petty kingdom; the lone nun who never wanted to be there, and who likes the outside world and its temptations too much, who then becomes the scapegoat; the retired Duke now a monk, who still acts rather as a back seat driver to his successor son. Perhaps surprisingly for a modern audience, the voice of reason, which stops the witch hunt and insists that the women are not really possessed at all, is the Inquisition!

The court of Louis XIV as depicted in Strange Relations is several levels up in the ladder of tyranny from the convent. In many ways it is the prototype of the modern totalitarian state, in which the whims of the all powerful leader, and access to him, determine who is to have power or not. The practices which became the basis of later sensational claims of devil-worshipping black-magic, were part of the semi-Christian folk magic of the period, and a time in which poison and infanticide were commonplace parts of folk culture.

Of the four books here, that by Ogden is perhaps most opaque to the lay reader. Maybe its subjects are too remote and the writing too dense. Davies is a much more accessible writer, though you will probably learn more about the publishing history of grimoires than you might feel you need to know, Watt propels us through the rather arcane world of the early modern Italy, with the human interest of the characters, many of whom you could meet in any modern office; while Mollenauer contains warnings about the corrupting power of any totalitarian system.

The old magic may now have faded away to statistical anomalies in card guessing games and New Age banalities, but magic is not dead. The old cliché says a sufficiently advanced technology will look like magic, but it is nearer to the point to say that a sufficiently advanced magic is technology. The new magic of science and technology gives human beings powers for good or ill which the old magicians could never have envisaged in their most ecstatic visions or wildest nightmares. -- Peter Rogerson.

A GRAND DAY OUT!

I want to thank everyone who was responsible for the excellent ‘London Lore’ conference held on Saturday 25th at the Bishopsgate Institute in London. Brilliantly organised by Scott Wood, from the South East London Folklore Society (SELFS), it presented a packed schedule of talks on London lore and legend, rumour and ritual. I’m sorry that I neglected to promote the event here, but as the venue was packed, I doubt Magonia’s intervention would have made much of a difference.

It’s good to see the way that neglected and forgotten ceremonies and rituals are being revived. Sarah Crofts explained how the chance finding of an old photograph led to the revival of Deptford’s ‘Jack in the Green’, (illustrated) returning a touch of rural magic to drab south London, and Sonia Ritter told how actors associated with Shakespeare's Globe on the South Bank helped to create new traditions around the food markets of Southwark and the money markets of The City, and adding to the City’s own traditions as described in another talk by folklorist Doc Rowe.

Paul Cowdell and Neil Rooney covered the urban legends of animal life in London - feral cats, urban foxes, omnipresent rats, and the ravens of the Tower of London (a very ancient legend tracing all the way back, apparently, to 1954!), and Scott himself delved into the history of the legend of the ‘Helpful Terrorist’ who warns a kindly stranger against travelling on the Tube on a certain date. Scott has traced this back to stories about nurses tending German PoW’s in First World War field hospitals, and is looking for earlier examples.

I had never heard of Edward Lovett before, but now want to know more about him and his works. In his Croydon home he assembled a huge collection of folk-artefacts: amulets, good-luck charms, dolls, tokens, printed ephemera, etc., gathered from the back-streets and markets of South London and the East End. A former work colleague of mine, folklorist and local historian Steve Roud, outlined Lovett’s life and work, whilst Neil Gordon Orr, of Southwark’s Cuming Museum, and Ross MacFarlane of the Wellcome Collection discussed the artefacts which Lovett had donated or sold to their own institutions.

Honorary Magonian Mark Pilkington revealed the secrets of the Brompton Cemetery time-machine, which of course I am not allowed to divulge in a public forum!

There is a small piece of waste ground in Southwark which was once a graveyard where the remains of the ‘Winchester Geese’ were buried. The ‘Geese’ were the prostitutes who operated in the ‘stews’, the brothels, conveniently across the river and outside the jurisdiction of the City of London, but effectively licensed by the Bishop of Winchester who owned the area. Forbidden from burial in hallowed ground these women, and other ‘outsiders’ - the lame, the maimed, the mad, the prostitutes babies - were buried in an unhallowed graveyard and forgotten.

In recent years their mass graves have been revealed through building work in the area, and excavations for railway extensions. The site is now known as the Crossbones Graveyard and local people, including the ‘urban shaman’ John Constable have started to honour and celebrate these ‘outsiders’ and seem to have convinced the local council and the GLA to make a permanent memorial garden on the site after the railway works have finished in a few years time.

Appropriately, as the last item on the programme, before we all hurried off to the pub, Tony Clayton entertained us with a few tales, legends and exotica of London pubs.

Talking to Scott afterwards it seems that one of his main problems in organising the event was deciding what to leave out, so it looks like there may be an opportunity for another event like this in the future. If so I promise I’ll give you a bit of notice next time!

"OUR WORK HERE IS DONE..."

Well, that's it then. The last issue of Magonia, printed, posted, done and dusted. How do I feel about it? A strange sense of release perhaps, which may - or may not - at some point in the future morph into an aching void somewhere deep in my being. But not just yet.

I look at the cupboard next to my desk, with its piles of old Magonias, all carefully preserved for the expected rush of orders for back issues now that the magazine has gently faded away - or alternatively carefully packed to make it easier to take them over to the recycling centre - and wonder just what has been achieved by all the effort they represent.

Well, most obviously, and most importantly, many people with lots of valuable and interesting things to say have had the opportunity to put their ideas in print and present them to an interested group of readers. It's a source of pride that Magonia over the years has carried articles by most of the influential figures in ufology in this country, Europe and the USA. It's particularly gratifying that one or two of them became influential as a result of being published in Magonia.

I have to say that I find it amazing that a magazine which has never had a circulation of more than - how can I put this tactfully? - the low hundreds, became so influential in the field. Even now, 'Magonian' is used as a term of abuse on some American websites!

I've said before that the main reason I decided to close the magazine was because I felt that ufology was just recycling the same material again and again, and the thought of embarking on a second hundred with pretty much the same old stuff, was just too much. Although ufology has some first-rate historians - and here I namecheck Jerome Clark and David Clarke - the subject as a whole has very little sense of history. Each new generation of ufologists seems to have to re-discover the subject for itself, presenting as new ideas topics which were discussed ten, twenty, thirty years ago.

Of course, some things have changed very radically, one being the status of UFO magazines. When I look back at the very early, slowly fossilizing layers of the Magonia files, I find a few crumbling copies of the 'Merseyside UFO Research Group Bulletin', the near-legendary ur-Magonia, just a few pages of stencil duplicated foolscap. On the back page of one of them is a list of exchange magazines: Allen Greenfield's UFO Sighter; Probe, the Controversial Phenomena Magazine; CFSIB Newsletter; UFOLOG, from the Isle of Wight; René Fouéré's Phénomena Spatiaux; GESAG Bulletin from Belgium; the American magazines from APRO and NICAP, and dozens of magazines from small local groups around Britain. To say nothing of BUFORA Bulletin and Flying Saucer Review.

Obviously a great deal of what used to be in such publications now surfaces in cyberspace, so I shouldn't be too nostalgic about them, but it's depressing that over the past few years some people have lost considerable amounts of money launching overambitious news-stand publications. But this still demonstrates the lure of the 'proper' print magazine.

The UFO website and the blog now represent what one of my colleagues memorably described as the 'gutter-roots' of ufology. It is here where the first rough scrapings of reports and research appear. In a couple of pieces in Magonia Peter Rogerson has described the way that the raw story, with all its untidiness, craziness and internal contradiction, is smoothed and edited into the received narrative, which forms the framework of the paperback bestseller and the lecture circuit, and feeds back into the way the whole phenomenon is structured. Perhaps the internet is going to make this process more difficult in future, and the uncomfortable 'gutter-roots' will sneak into the mainstream. This process is well advanced in politics, as anyone who's been taking notice of events in the UK over the past few weeks will know.

The Internet has hastened (but not caused) the collapse of the structure of UFO groups and the UFO magazine, but has done nothing but good for serious UFO research. MUFOB and Magonia's aim, from its earliest days, was the destruction of the system of local and national groups. This has happened, and we acknowledge the kind assistance of Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

I conclude this piece with the last sentences from my last editorial notes in Magonia 99:

"... with the demise of the membership organisation, which must always pander to the lowest common denominator, [British ufology] has become what MUFOB/Magonia has been seeking for forty years: a group of individual researchers with expertise in a range of subject, who co-operate informally and voluntarily without the need of a bureaucratic 'National UFO Group'.

"Our work here is done!"

HUFFORD AND THE HAG

One of the most (if not the most) important books ever written on the subject of UFO abductions is David Hufford's The Terror That comes in the Night. It deals with the 'Old Hag' night-visitor phenomenon, which is intimately connected to alien abductions.

Magonia recognised the importance and relevance of this book when it was first published, and acknowleged that it provides a key to understanding a wide range of human experiences which had previously been considered only in terms of rumour and folklore. Hufford's work made it clear that these were real experiences that happened to real people who reported them accurately, but by and large to people who didn't take them seriously!

The exact interpretation of Hufford's work has for a long time been a bone of contention between Magonia's editors and America's leading UFO historian and encyclopaedist, Jerome Clark. I won't go into the details of it here, but those who need to know will find it archived ad nauseam on the UFO UpDates Archives.

The best thing is to let Hufford speak about it for himself, and here he is in a short clip from a recent documentary Your Worst Nightmare: Supernatural Assault: David Hufford on Sleep Paralysis (For full details of the documentary go to: http://www.soulsmack.com/ -- Hat-tip to 'Damn Data' - see bloglist - for the information and link)

A NEW SCIENCE OF LIFE REVISITED

Rupert Sheldrake. A New Science of Life, 3rd edition, Icon Books, 2009.

When this book was first published nearly 30 years ago, it received truly excellent publicity, when the then editor of Nature magazine, John Maddox, described it as a heresy and a suitable candidate for burning. Not surprisingly many people bought the book to see what the fuss was about. Looking at it now, I am not sure that many of those who did so would have followed the rather technical nature of many of the arguments within the book.

Like most lay people, I would have assumed that the huge strides in conventional biology over the last generation, the age of the genetic revolution, would have even more sidelined Sheldrake, who remains a voice crying in, if not the wilderness, then a very sparsely inhabited place. Sheldrake will have none of this however, and claims that gaps in biological knowledge make his theory even more credible. This would seem to suggest that the famous morphic and morphogenetic fields are 'fields of the gaps'

Within the main book however, a separate problem arises, for they are seen to explain everything. Of course, I am not in a position to evaluate the numerous technical points, but even as a lay person I can see that if you invent some hypothetical entity for which there is no direct evidence, then ascribe to it just such properties are needed to explain X, Y and Z, then it will indeed easily explain X, Y and Z. But this sort of thing doesn't impress mainstream scientists, because it doesn't actually lead anywhere.

Sheldrake has all along advocated experiments to test his hypothesis, and that rather separates him from a large proportion of the general run of pseudo-scientists, but it is not clear that even if his predications were realised, that they would automatically prove his hypothesis or rule out others.

For, to take an example not used in his book; UK students tend to score higher and higher marks on standard exams such as the GCSE. This is often ascribed to the questions getting easier, though others would argue that is because the pupils are taught better or more thoroughly coached. Sheldrake would explain it by the students interacting with the morphic fields of previous takers. It is not clear how one separates any of these out.

Thus while Sheldrake may (or may not, I wouldn't know) highlight genuine anomalies, for example, changes in the melting point of certain substances, or ease of making crystals, and his suggestion that the "laws" of nature are not fixed and immutable, has a good Fortean ring to it, his general hypothesis looks just all embracing and metaphysical to look like good modern science. It seeking to explain everything, it simply sidelines lots of what we already know.

Despite the introduction's appeal to secular science, and the suggestion that he is discarding ancient metaphysical baggage, it is clear that the actual appeal is quite the opposite. Sheldrake's constant attacks on 'materialism' and 'mechanism' show that what really appals him is the disenchantment of nature in modernity. This is very evident in several of his other books, and it is the content of these which gives rise to the suspicion that for all its experimental and at least quasi scientific veneer, the real purpose of the theory of 'morphic resonance' is to act as the intelligent designers put it, as wedge or perhaps a jemmy to prize open the door of scientific naturalism. -- Peter Rogerson

FACT, FANTASY AND GOOD SENSE ON UFOS

John Michael Greer. The UFO Phenomenon: Fact, Fantasy and Disinformation. Llewellyn, 2009.

When you read that the author of this book is "a student of magic and the unexplained ... with training and initiation into several Druid and occult orders" you might think this is going to be one of those strange crank books that exist on the fringes of ufology. You would be wrong, because it is a very sensible book, which critically examines the cases made by proponents and critics of ufology and finds both wanting.

Rather than examining the evidence in an opened minded, scientific fashion, both sides, he argues, use rhetoric to argue for their predetermined conclusions; the ETH on the one hand, the null hypothesis on the other. UFO proponents argue roughly that UFO cases which cannot be given a satisfactory mundane explanation are ipso facto evidence for extraterrestrial spaceships, skeptics on the other hand argue that extraterrestrial visits are unlikely, all UFO reports must be misperceptions and hoaxes. This image of the flying saucer as the extraterrestrial spaceship is founded in popular culture.

He makes many of the same points that I have about the ETH, that in the absence of any information as to the nature or capabilities of ETs just about anything can be explained by the ETH; that what people report are really folk images of spaceships and extraterrestrials (real aliens likely to be much more alien than the humanoid figures of UFO literature), the lack of physical evidence and so forth; and how the ETH is founded upon hidden assumptions about the great chain of being and unlimited technological progress, and that the latter may well be an illusion He notes equally that many null hypothesis supporters also create virtually irrefutable hypotheses.

He looks at various alternatives, many of which have similar problems to the ETH, in that they are based on arguments from ignorance. He comes up with three potential streams to account for unexplained UFO reports: poorly understood physical phenomena of the earthlights variety, ‘apparitional’ experiences generated in altered states of consciousness, (interestingly he claims that one occult training to generate visionary experience is to stare at the sky for long periods of time) and cover-ups of secret military projects.

In support of the last hypothesis, he notes the curious behaviour of the official investigations, which by their often implausible explanations, gave rise to suspicions of cover-ups, and actually helped promote the ETH. He even argues that some UFO reports may have been made up by the military to covertly promote the ETH. This comes close to the territory of the hypothetical ‘Project Far Stranger', the idea that there was a conspiracy launched in the immediate post-war world to promote the idea of extraterrestrial invaders to unite humankind against a common enemy. The problem with these sorts of explanation is that they rapidly descend into the realm of the grandiose conspiracy theories which blame everything on the Jewish, Communist, Jesuit, Freemason, American bankers in the Vatican, and the Reptillian Illuminati.

While I don't agree with everything here, and can see several gaps in Greer's knowledge of the subject, this is a book worth recommending to believers and skeptics alike to challenge their presuppositions.

YOU COULDN'T MAKE IT UP

I don't want to sound like Richard Littlejohn, (oh well, why not?), but really!

Two psychics have been given government funding to teach people how to "communicate with the dead". Paul and Deborah Rees have been awarded £4,500 under the Government's Want2Work job creation scheme, reports the Daily Telegraph. The couple, from Bridgend, South Wales, will use it to instruct people on how to contact friends and relatives "on the other side".

Critics are astonished at the award by the Department of Work and Pensions bureaucrats, and the Welsh Assembly has launched an investigation. The mediums insist the "mere £4,500" of public money will be put to good use at their centre, the Accolade Academy of Psychic and Mediumistic Studies.

Mr Rees, 40, a former upholsterer, said: "People who have lost mums and dads or a child deserve all the respect in the world in their grieving, and they deserve a medium who can give them respect. "Our job is to provide substantial evidence to bring ease to people's grieving - and that's what I would say to people who query the award.

Mr Rees said he had his 37-year-old wife had to negotiate "a lot of red tape" to secure the grant, which is intended to help start-up businesses. "They hadn't invested in psychics before so we really had to prove ourselves," he said.

But Tory Welsh Assembly member Jonathan Morgan said: "It is an utter disgrace that taxpayers' money is being wasted and given to an organisation that believes it can teach people how to communicate with the dead.

Surely scope for some enterprising ufologist to scam a bit of money off the taxpayer, oops, sorry, make a claim for a valid job-creation project?

THE ALIEN DECEPTION: A MAGONIA VIEWPOINT

Nigel Watson. The Alien Deception: an Exploration of the Alien Abduction Phenomenon. Privately published, 2009. Reviewed by Peter Rogerson.

The sensation-seeking reader who is beguiled by the title into thinking that this book is promoting some sort of extraterrestrial conspiracy theory will be sadly disappointed, for it is a detailed and sober analysis of the rise of the abduction myth.

Nigel starts with the Hill abduction, and then draws in the various threads which led to it. He chronicles the rise of beliefs in extraterrestrial flying saucers, the rise of the idea of contacting their pilots in the contactees and contactee groups of the 1950s, and the gradual rise of the abduction stories.

He sees predecessors of these in the airship tales of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (a subject of which he has made a special study), when tales of encounters and in some cases abductions by airship crews developed. These themes developed through popular culture, particularly film (Nigel in another incarnation is a film critic). But they are also based on other themes which Nigel examines in great detail, the idea of being taken by the ‘other’ in fairy-lore, where tales continue into the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Nigel gives some examples of these. There also roots in what were known as captivity narratives, tales told by ‘survivors’ of capture exotic human groups (Native Americans in America, Barbary pirates in Europe). Through this weaving, rather than a straightforward chronological narrative, Nigel shows how all these themes influenced one another and gave rise to the modern corpus.

Nigel examines these modern stories, and notes that that is exactly what they are, stories, often fashioned by third parties such as abduction hunters out of masses of confused "testimony" often produced under hypnotic regression. Of actual hard evidence there is none (there is, for example, always some reason or other why abductions are never caught on video or CCTV though various attempts to do this have been tried. Though supporters of exotic explanations can always find some excuse for this, there is no evidence to compel us to accept their kind of explanation, and plenty to make us lean towards a psycho-social interpretation.

Many of the arguments in this book will, of course, be familiar to long-time Magonia readers, indeed it might well be regarded as the book of the Magonia position on such subjects, but for some readers this will be a new and challenging interpretation.

This is an important book, and one which I recommend (but I would, wouldn't I, as Nigel quotes from quite a few of my articles?); though I recognise that there are various features in the book’s production (my copy is unpaginated) which might be make it less appealing than it should be, and perhaps should act as a warning about the pitfalls of self publishing, although given how Nigel was let down by a variety of publishers over the years of the book’s gestation, I can see why he chose that road). -- Peter Rogerson

DOCTOR VALLEE'S DIARY

Jacques Vallee. Forbidden Science: Volume Two, Journals 1970-1979. Documatica Research, 2009. £33.50 - Reviewed by Peter Rogerson

Not a cheap book, nor one that is likely to attract a wide audience from the general public, but Vallée's diaries will be of interest to three groups of readers: historians of the computer industry, social historians of 1970s California, and ufologists of a certain age. Yours truly fits into the latter category, and what attracted me to this book was not the hard science, (there isn't any) or the amazing revelations (there aren't any) but the portraits of people whose names were familiar, and the general gossip.

The book practically begins with one of those UFO conferences, this time in a French country house owned by a relative of Vallée. Among the guests is Charles Bowen, the depressed, henpecked editor of FSR, who is non too pleased that the conference is being held in the middle of nowhere rather than Paris, and spends the time whining about his godawful wife, godawful job and godawful financial state of FSR, and being put out by the presence of Michel Jaffe of the American UFO group Data Net, whom, Bowen whines, is "not a recognised authority" (one wants to say "like what I am" in imitation of Ernie Wise).

Much of the ufological part of these diaries is taken up with Vallee's relationship with J. Allen Hynek, and the latter's various grand plans, all of which tend to come to nothing, including the great CUFOS, whose science directors seem to spend the time resigning and whose supreme headquarters was a shop front next door to a dry cleaners in a down-market suburb of Chicago. At least this seems to be an improvement on the bankrupt NICAP, and APRO. Once upon a time one of the French ufologists (not the one who was the son of former President of France), went on a several thousand mile trip to visit the Lorenzen's, who spent the entire time whining on about their dead dog!

Perhaps diaries are always in some ways ghost stories, haunted by lost lives, lost childhoods and lost youth. Vallée's chronicle of the 1970s haunts us with images of a time when almost anything seemed possible and exiting: when psychical research looked as though it might become scientifically respectable, and all sorts of gurus claimed to have answers.

Vallée introduces us to a range of characters who might be characterised as Byronic, i.e. mad, bad and dangerous to know. There is Anton Le Vey the well known lion tamer, self proclaimed Satanist and friend of Jayne Mansfield, Sammy Davis Jnr. and Marcello Truzzi, Ira Einhorn the well known guru and murderer; the former contributor to FSR revealed as an occultist, crypto-fascist, and permanently stoned freeloader; there are Targ and Puthoff, Ingo Swann and other inhabitants of the Californian psychical research scene; the 'intelligence officers' and others who are about to reveal the big secret but never get round to it. There is the adventure of hunting for the great ufological breakthrough in arcane texts and lost philosophies, the sense that some great revelation is round the corner.

The end of the diary is marked by disillusion; Einhorn’s murder of his girlfriend Holly marking the final seal on the loss of hippie innocence, which in truth had gone bad years before. The New Age was going to be as sick and sad as the old one.

Thirty years on from the last entry there is still no great ufological or paranormal revelation, not an inch forward, but miles backward. The reasons are obvious from this book, the endless back biting, the utterly shambolic nature of the ‘investigators‘, but above all, the pursuit of a chimera, the idea that there is a unique UFO phenomenon, which is the product of some sort of non-human intelligence. Though Vallée at times accepts that the UFO phenomenon or phenomena is/are a compound of various physical, psychological and socio-cultural factors and makes much of criticising supporters of the ETH, he is, himself still wedded to the chimera of single core UFO phenomenon as the product of mysterious non-human intelligences. He still cannot see that attempts to interpret anomalous experiences in terms of non-human intelligences of unknown nature, origin and powers, can only lead at best to years of futility and waste, and at worst a one way trip to either the cultist's compound or the mental hospital.

Had ufology abandoned this futile quest and asked realistic questions about the kinds of atmospheric phenomena and psychological/neurological processes which might generate puzzling UFO reports it may actually have got somewhere and contributed something to science, and an attempt to understand what kinds of human needs the UFO mythology answers would have given us some valuable insights into the human condition.