BRAIN AND CONSCIOUSNESS

Alva Noe. Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons From the Biology of Consciousness. Hill and Wang, 2009

If paranormalists, seeing the title of this book, think the author, a professor of Philosophy and member of the Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, is going to support their belief that consciousness is some kind of etheric stuff which can float around operating tables, they are going to be disappointed. If anything Noe's thesis is even more ‘materialistic’ than the more conventional accounts of neuroscience. It is that while the brain is necessary for consciousness, it is not sufficient. Consciousness instead arises from the embodied brain of the total being in interaction with the physical and social environment.

He rejects the idea that isolated brains in vats could be conscious or, if they are, that consciousness is the result of the interaction of the brain and its surrogate, mechanical, body with the whole environment. Associated with this thesis, Noe also rejects constructivist approach to perception, the idea that the world we experience is a model of the world constructed by the brain, it is unclear to the extent that he is substituting a more naively realistic approach. Though he discusses dreams to some extent, he does not cover synaethesia or the sort of experiences with which Magonia deals, which might suggest a more constructivist view of perception.

UFOs IN THE ARCHIVES

David Clarke. The UFO Files: The Inside Story of Real-life Sightings. The National Archives, 2009.

If someone had said say 20 years ago, that a UK 'government agency' would publish a book on UFOs, or at least one that did not dismiss the subject with a laugh and a sneer, they would have been thought crazy. Well times change. However this change of policy has less to do with some sort of "educational policy" than the realisation that UFOs look a likely mulch cow for the cash strapped National Archives, which appears not to be making as much money out of the family historians as they thought they were going to. The release of so many documents to them under the Freedom of Information Act looks like a boon.

That being said, this is a sensible and sober approach to the subject by one of the very few people who investigates the subject without pursuing some kind of agenda. He traces official involvement with strange objects and lights in the sky going back to the time of the 1909 and 1913 airships, including little known studies during the First World War. A couple of these WWI accounts look really puzzling; one may perhaps be the first 'electromagnetic' case reported. It concerns a fighter pilot sent up to intercept a suspected Zeppelin, who finds his plane misfiring, then sees above him and to the right "row of lighted windows which looked something like a railway carriage with the blinds drawn". The pilot draws out his pistol (yes, pistol, this is the First World War) at which the lights rise into the darkness and breakneck speed.

Of particular interest is a previously untapped source: a 1921 survey of ball lighting reports. Clarke estimates that only 65 out of 115 letters and questionnaires returned related to things which might reasonably be classed as ball lightening, the rest consists of a miscellaneous collection of peculiar lights in the sky of various kinds, some of which rather resemble modern UFO reports.

There are a couple of equally interesting reports from the Second World War, in which something other than the fuzzy foo fighters were seen, though it is perhaps significant that the actual report of an object most closely resembling a modern UFO was not made contemporaneously, but decades later, well into the age of the flying saucer.

As we get into the post 1947 era of the flying saucer, we can trace all the various highways and byways of official investigations, virtually all predicated on the view that if what was seen wasn't Russian it was of no little or no defence significance or interest. Veteran ufologists who read this book in hopes of 'smoking guns' and 'amazing revelations' will be rather disappointed, for it is clear that reports investigated officially were the same sort of report, and in many cases exactly the same reports that were investigated by various ufologists, and appeared in the pages of Flying Saucer Review. So for us old-timers this is more of a nostalgia fest than a revelation. Of course, veteran ufologists are not the main intended audience.

In many ways this book demonstrates that the official investigations showed what was already known by the saner ufologists: that the vast majority of UFO reports are generated by a vast variety of normal stimuli, which witnesses misidentify, misperceive or mis-remember, but that there is a small group which if accurately reported are very puzzling indeed. Whether they would remain so if subjected a really thorough scientific investigation is a moot point, and of course unidentified and puzzling are not the same thing as extraterrestrial. Indeed the puzzling reports are probably just as heterogeneous as the rest.

What is clear is that there is no secret information, no smoking gun, no inside knowledge. In fact Clarke confirms what we might suspect, that the views held by the various officials involved mirrored those of the general public, and were based on the same popular books. This seems to be still the case. For example, it seems pretty obvious that the background knowledge on UFOs of the anonymous author of the Condign Report was largely based on the writings of Jenny Randles.

Sometimes there were cock-ups of the silliest kinds, like the exasperated warnings to pilots not to amuse themselves on training flights by looking for crop circles, as this was giving rise to rumours of "an official investigation".

So all in all an excellent introduction for the newcomer and a welcome walk down memory lane for the veteran ufologist, and a reminder to us all that things in the this field are likely to be a good deal more complicated than the simple world views of the more naive 'believers' and 'skeptics' alike. Every ufologist should have this book. -- Peter Rogerson.

LIFE AFTER DEATH

Anthony Peake. Is There Life After Death? The Extraordinary Science of What Happens When We Die. Arcturus Publishing, 2006.

Anthony Peake. The Daemon: A Guide to Your Extraordinary Secret Self. Arcturus Publishing, 2008.

My unpublished review of the first of these books, written in 2006/7, given below, shows that I was not mightily impressed the first time round:

The reader who gets this book looking for the latest evidence from psychical research, some new amazing scientific breakthrough will be sorely disappointed, for this book is really just an amalgam of poorly understood, often very 1970s pop science and philosophical musings.

To cut to the chase, you know all those odd Fortean mysteries? Well Peake can explain them all. You see what happens when you die is that you live your life all over again, and again and again ad nauseum, in the last few moments of your life. So chances are that this life your living now is most likely just to be a memory of a memory of a memory and so on. That might seem rather a little boring and pointless, so Peake argues that you can alter things because your inner daimon knows that this is just a memory and warns you not to give all your hard earned cash to that plausible con man which meant you had to send your wife to work as cocktail waitress, with somewhat unpleasant consequences. But you might argue that memories are memories, and even if you change them, you haven't changed what really happened. To get over this one we get into some complicated arguments about parallel universes and many worlds.

Problem with that is that while certain interpretations of the many world hypothesis suggest you might in your own private world you might escape an instantaneous annihilation initiated by a random quantum event (a not very usual means of decease) you would not end up running your life over again, but would just carry on the rest of your normal life in the time track in which you survive, only problem is that everyone you interact with would be a zombie, because in their world you died, and they would have no conscious experience of the rare number of worlds in which you survived.

One wonders what sort of person could be attracted to Peake's philosophy, presumably someone who has had a fairly cushy life, which they would love to rerun with just a few minor changes here and there, and little empathy or regard for other people less fortunate than oneself. This a world in which a woman is raped over and over again, Jews are chucked into the gas ovens over and over again, slaves live on the plantation over and over again, magnifying the injustices of the world to the nth degree. Not surprisingly one of the few things that observant Christians, Muslims, Jews and Humanists can agree on is that the doctrine of eternal return is a bloody awful philosophy.

It should also be pointed out while the idea of 'many worlds' has its attractions, in that one imagine alternate worlds in which ones loved ones still live on, where life's turnings could have taken a better course, and that the idea of a Totality of Being which encompasses all possible histories of all possible universes is certainly awe inspiring when viewed from an Olympian height, at a more parochial level it has certain disadvantages, such as failing to explain why we are in this particular world and not one of the zillions of others, how to escape its solipsistic conclusions, or find a mechanism to allow for all observers to share a common history; or even more unpleasantly it implies that just about anything and everything could happen to any of us, in a billion worlds: you, dear reader, are the victim of every conceivable kind of serial killer and general cosmic nastiness, to say nothing of those billion worlds in which you perpetrate unspeakable crimes. A billion worlds in which you a trillionaire and cop off with the celebrity of your choice doesn't exactly balance the score.

Peake clearly is enamoured of solipsism of some sort or other, which makes me wonder why he bothered to write this book, he must assume that there are real, live, real time people out there to read it.

The second book still fails to address these issues, and is full of the same errors and old fashioned ideas as the first. Thus on page six we get "there is overpowering scientific evidence that we forget absolutely nothing. All our experiences, thoughts and sensations, are held, recorded and waiting to be replayed". I doubt there is a single mainstream psychologist who holds to that view, and there is to the contrary considerable scientific evidence that memory is largely reconstructed and often confabulated. The author's views on the infinite divisibility of time are incompatible with quantum mechanics and so on.

This book now features more on the amazing abilities of the 'daemon' now identified with the non-dominant right hemisphere of the brain. This is supposed to retain awareness at death, while the left hemisphere or eidolon, here identified with normal consciousness goes on its endless reruns. In both books Peake argues that these reruns are subjective phenomena, and that to an outside observer the person is dying, He now argues that the daemon can warn the eidolon of forthcoming events because it remembers the events from previous reruns. He uses as evidence cases of alleged precognition, but these are reports in books and journals and therefore events in public space, implying that these reruns are public events. A complete self contradiction, not smoothed over by hand waving and using mantras like quantum mechanics, implicate order and many worlds.

This is, I am afraid typical of the problems likely to be encountered by those who ignore that fine piece of Ancient Brigantian wisdom, "Tha can't have tha cake and eat it." -- Reviewed by Peter Rogerson

SKEPTICS V. BELIEVERS: NO-SCORE DRAW

Chris Carter. Parapsychology and the Skeptics: a Scientific Argument for the Existence of ESP. SterlingHouse, 2007.

Henri Broch. Exposed! Ouija, Firewalking and other Gibberish. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

One of the main features of the debates surrounding a range of anomalous claims, is the quasi religious divide into rival ideological camps marked 'believer' and 'sceptic' which is rarely encountered elsewhere in science, however rancorous these disputes can become. Perhaps the only other examples which come to immediate mind are the debates surrounding human induced global warming, or some of debates surrounding AIDS.

Part of the difficulty in the case of the parapsychology is that the divide is not over whether or not particular anomalies exist or not, though these do occur, but on the philosophical superstructures erected on those anomalies. Once these ideological camps are set up, then debates rapidly assume the character of party political polemic of the sort we have in this country in Prime Minister's Question Time or on TV shows like Any Questions or Question Time. In this debate each side claims that it has the perfect policies and the most noble and true hearted spokespersons while the other’s policies would ruin the country, and is staffed in large part by Satan's less salubrious spawn.

Chris Carter is the Believer in this debate, and claims that "this is the book the skeptics don't want you to read". I am not sure whether some reviewer in the Skeptical Inquirer has actually said "don't read this book", but I rather doubt it. Perhaps he thinks that it will refute skeptics claims with the brilliance of its arguments, but there again I suspect he will be disappointed.

There are a number of actual claims in this book, which fall into the category of interesting if true, such as that experiments conducted by Susan Blackmore which she argues produced the negative results that turned her into a skeptic, actually produced positive results. Also the study by Richard Wiseman on the dog Jaytee, where Wiseman claimed to have refuted Rupert Sheldrake's claim that the said dog knew when its owner was coming home, actually confirmed it. There are also statistically arguments about the Gazfield experiment, with claim and counter claim. Think of party political clashes on government spending figures or the size of the national debt. Which side you believe tends to reflect which party you support.

Of course if this was just a debate about statistical anomalies then little of this heat would be generated. Unlike claims on, for example, the relationship between smoking and lung cancer, or air travel and global warming, there is little immediate consequence and no suggested course of action which might have a major impact on how people live their lives.

Rather the heat is generated by the philosophical superstructure. Carter like many other parapsychologists is not really interested in the statistical anomalies themselves, but in their utility as battering rams against 'materialism' and much of the contemporary scientific world view. It is precisely the fear of this battering ram or wedge which motivates many sceptics to go to extraordinary and sometimes less than scrupulous lengths to oppose claims for psi.

This also sets the demarcation line between believer and sceptic and a way rather different from mainstream science. Mainstream science (in theory if by no means always in practice) looks to competing hypotheses as potential explainers of certain observations or experiments in a fairly neutral fashion. However in parapsychology, rejection of certain interpretations of the results say of the Gazfield experiments marks one out as a sceptic. Those who propose hypotheses other than what might be called 'transcendental ESP' are accused of explaining away and are regarded as no longer part of the team. It is as if Lavoisier was regarded as not being a 'real' chemist because he 'explained away' pholigiston. Today we can see that 'explaining away' led to the flowering of modern chemistry. Psi might well be the phloigiston of today.

Susan Blackmore is probably saying just that when she argues that the search for the evidence for psi is getting nowhere. That does not automatically mean that there are no puzzling statistical anomalies, and that people do not have anomalous experiences which cannot be easily explained within current concepts, merely that the psi of the parapyschologists is not what is causing them, or that the term itself is simply an empty slogan.

Carter does not want to accept this, because he wants to attack 'materialist science'. Of course he also wants to have his scientific cake as well as eat it, so he appeals to quantum mechanics to try and get him out of the fix. Rather he appeals to a minority position within QM which argues for the crucial role of consciousness in collapsing quantum states into the defined world. He could, of course be up front about this and argue that "a minority of physicists believe ... and if they are right ... etc". But he does something else; he pretends they are the majority, and in presenting a list of alternatives, omits the one that is probably the majority view. In this the 'observer' which collapses the quantum state is nothing more than the environment in general.

There is real problem with the idea of consciousness collapsing quantum states, for this implies that consciousness is a physical thing interacting with the rest of the physical world. But consciousness is not a thing, it is a property. We might argue over what sort of thing or things it is a property of (the total embodied human being, the electrical and chemical activity in the human brain, powerful computers, any complex information processing system, life in general, matter in general, the whole of space time, some pre-geometrical bedrock, some field or other, astral bodies, astral brains), but it is a property all the same. What collapsed the quantum state would be the X factor that consciousness was a property of in that case.

Not only does Carter appeal to quantum mechanics in this rather underhand way, he also appeals to authority, with lists of scientists and others who support his world view. Trouble is that they are all dead, they are people from past generations. He might be correct in arguing that CSICOP sought to bolster its standing be inviting on board all sorts of authorities who looked good but knew nothing about the subject in hand, but the SPR did the same thing, and paranormalists now go on quoting mainly antique figures, as if they represent modern science.

The result is that though Carter lands a few bruising punches, they are drowned out by the rhetoric. This is not a knockout blow.

Does the opposing player, sceptic Henri Bloch score any decisive blow? Definitely not, for perhaps the greatest mystery of this book is how it got published by a major academic publisher. It is an essentially superficial account, and follows the classic skeptic pattern of the scatter-gun approach, so we have critiques of fire-handling, the ouija board, the Shroud of Turin, astrology, dowsing, clairvoyance. etc., etc. Academic parapsychology is dismissed by a quotation from Irving Langmuir about an alleged interview with J. B. Rhine, in which Langmuir claims that Rhine had cabinets full of unpublished results, and that he had "millions of cases" in which he had a success rate of 7 out of 25. Someone is talking rubbish here, for a million runs at a minute a run would mean working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for 19 years! I suspect that Langmuir might have misheard Rhine defending the non-publication of negative runs, by arguing that it would take millions of such runs to even the odds out.

Bloch performs his own experiments, and tests clairvoyants. Here is a typical report (it is a little longer than most)

"S claimed to have a gift of extrasensory perception that gave her the ability ... to see the contents of sealed envelopes. ... We carried out a test of her extrasensory powers in our laboratory in May 2001 using photos - landscapes and portraits - sealed in envelopes. As requested by the clairvoyant we ensured the opacity of the envelopes using a sheet of heavy folded paper. She was supplied with a list of possible responses, together with a photocopy of the pictures. The experiment was extremely simple. However the clairvoyant saw nothing". (p23)

There are six other equally negative, equally brief and uninformative reports. Now you don't need ESP to know that if Broch had claimed a positive result for these seven cases, citing this kind of detail, there is no way that would have been published by an academic publisher, or for that matter by any respectable journal of parapsychology.

Let us take another example. A subject claims to have the ability to will a small door in a small room to close. He actually demonstrates this (it is not clear whether the door was pushed or pulled). Broch explains this by musculokinesis or myokinesis. This means that when the subject concentrated "he rapidly relaxed and contracted his pectoral and abdominal muscles" which led to "the creation of a subsonic acoustic wave by the compression and decompression of the thorax or abdomen, provoked by the abrupt muscular movements, whose effect was optimised by the small size of the room" (p29-30)

A quick Google search shows that neither musculokinesis nor myokineses with this meaning are recognised scientific terms. This is not a piece of established science, but a claim. To me this sounds like an extraordinary claim, for which I would rather like extraordinary evidence, and not just a lot of mathematical calculations. Now it is also an interesting claim, and if verified by repeated experiments, might suggest a possible starting point for the explanation of some otherwise puzzling anomalous personal experiences. However, imagine that Broch had claimed this effect not as a skepical demolition of psychokinesis, but as a claim that he had not only experimentally demonstrated PK but had a suggested physical mechanism for it in at least some cases. Again do you think that a major academic publisher would have produced a book making such an unverified claim?.

Increasingly this debate between believers and skeptics, in which both sides martial one sided evidence and arguments to bolster their own supporters, and often misrepresent the views of the other gets us nowhere. Both sides can make telling points against the other and raise valid issues, but these usually apply as much to themselves as their opponents, and many of the most telling blows are self inflicted. It is like watching a soccer match in which most of the goals are own goals.

SECTS, DRUGS AND CHUPACABRA

Andy Roberts. Albion Dreaming: A Popular History of LSD in Britain. Marshall Cavendish, 2008

If one of the successes of an author is able to grab the interest of the reader who has little knowledge or interest in a topic, then Andy Roberts succeeded with me here. Those who know me can testify that I was never ever remotely interested in the drugs scene or its cultural by-products back in the 60s and 70s. In fact I tended to think that it was the sort of thing that was diverting the likes of Bob Dylan from their rightful role of singing protest songs to the accompaniment of an acoustic guitar and preparing for the revolution. Although I wouldn't diverge all that much from that opinion even now, I found myself surprisingly sympathetic to Andy's arguments and to his portrayal.

There is much here for those who want to look at the LSD craze and society's reaction to it in terms of our old Magonian friends, Habitat and Wilderness, or Victor Turner's dichotomy between communitatas and structure, and whatever your personal views on the subject, this is a fascinating social history of Britain in what seems like an almost forgotten age, perhaps only glimpsed by me in the sort of alternative bookshops in which early issues of MUFOB were hawked.

Jonathan Downes. The Island of Paradise: Crash Retrievals, Chupacabra and Accelerated Evolution on the Island of Puerto Rico. CFZ Press, 2008.

Readers who purchase this book for amazing encounters with Chupacabras and fantastic revelations about crashed flying saucers are going to be somewhat disappointed. On the other hand those who love wild, disorganised travel books full of hilarious anecdote and barbed polemic might well love this account of Downes' trip to Puerto Rico in 2004. Increasingly I think that with the right self discipline and a high quality editor Downes could get a reputation as a great travel writer; the trouble is that in their absence he tends to digress on to what appears to be his real obsession, the sad life and loves of Jonathan Downes. I suppose this can be therapeutic for those who think their own lives and families are dysfunctional, bringing the realisation that you have way to go folks!

Michael Haag. The Templars, History and Myth. Profile Books, 2009

The Templars have become one of the principle subjects beloved by 'alternate historians', conspiracy theorists and assorted cranks. This well researched book presents the genuine history of the Templars and the turbulent times of the crusades, based in part on newly available evidence, which also gives useful background to today's conflicts. Haag also examines the rise of the conspiracy theories and the image of Templars in popular culture. A useful antidote to the reams of the speculative nonsense and pseudohistory. Also includes a tourist guide to Templar locations.

The Fortean Times Paranormal Handbook, edited and compiled by David Sutton. Sutton Publishing, 2009.

Essentially a special issue of Fortean Times devoted to introductory material and research guides on a range of Fortean Phenomena. Each section has an roundup article by writers in the field such as Alan Murdie on ghosts, Karl Shuker on cryptozoology, Jenny Randles on UFOs, Bob Rickard on life after death, Guy Lyon Playfair on psychic powers, Merrily Harpur on alien big cats, Mark Pilkington on crop circles and Ted Harrison on miracles, and articles for each topic on how to investigate. There are also other articles on special topics.

This means that the newcomer gets some idea of the wide range of often contradictory ideas and outlooks which surround these subjects, and some sensible advice and decent booklists. While aimed primarily at the newcomer and wannbe investigator, and in parts old hat to the likes of Magonia, there is still some good stuff for all. For me the outstanding piece was Therese Taylor's revisionist account of Lourdes, setting the story in its local folkloric context, as opposed the standard, very prettified and tidied up 'official' account. It is a perfect example of how many paranormal/Fortean stories originated in protean anomalous experiences which are then reconstituted under the influence of personal and communal belief systems. --Reviews by Peter Rogerson

SEX, GHOSTS AND THE SPR

Trevor Hamilton. Immortal Longings: F. W. H. Myers and the Victorian Search for Life after Death. Imprint Academic, 2009.

The first full length biography of the controversial Victorian psychical researcher, and likely to remain the standard biography for some considerable time, as well as being a major sympathetic study of the early days of the Society for Psychical Research, and of the Victorian milieu.

Hamilton takes us through the many complexities of this field, and the life of a peculiarly complicated man whose quest was conducted under a the tension of emotionally hoping to prove the post-mortem survival of his great love, his cousin-in-law Annie Marshall, and a rational desire properly to accrue evidence. How one assesses his success in this rather depends on ones own views on these topics, much the same goes for Myers himself. Partly this is because the founders of the SPR have been converted into plaster saints by many of their successors, and particularly in the satirical sixties there were those whose chief hobby was kicking plaster saints off their pedestals and breaking them into pieces. Thus believers and sceptics tend to separate very clearly into the 'right and romantic' or 'wrong and repulsive' schools (the options of 'wrong but romantic' or 'right but repulsive' don't get much of a look in). Hamilton very much leans to the former view, though he is aware of Myers' several faults, such as being a crashing snob.

Of course this was par for the course in Victorian times: patronage of the 'lower orders' being the willingness to believe just about anything the right sort of people told them. Hamilton tends to share this to some extent, for example his comments that certain pieces of information could only come from access to 'academic sources', which the medium Mrs Piper, being the dull wife of a dull shopkeeper couldn't possibly be aware of, let alone interested in. Once suspects that comment both underplays the accessibility of biographical information, and underestimates Mrs Piper's intellect; that the dull persona was just another act, conscious or otherwise, necessary to navigate life as a storekeeper's wife.

It is difficult to assess at this point in time just how good or otherwise much of the evidence accumulated by Myers and his colleagues was, not least because so much of it dealt with "matters of a private nature", i.e. lost and not all together appropriate love affairs. In Myers case this resulted in the long suffering Mrs Myers destroying much correspondence and notes, because it concerned his love for Annie Marshall. Hamilton excuses Myers on the grounds that this was a 'Platonic' love, but I am sure that the realisation that your partner is passionately in love with someone else, even if they have never slept with each other, and the other party is twenty years dead, can be no less devastating than finding out that they have had quite a few tumbles in bed, but still always in the end put you first.

Perhaps the fact that people today think any of this matters says much about the real status of psychical research. The edifices of mainstream science are not shaken to the core by the revelations that Isaac Newton was a total all round shit, who spent large parts of his intellectual life devoted to alchemy and Bible prophecy, that Antoine Lavoisier was a corrupt tax gatherer, that Michael Faraday was a member of a peculiar religious sect, that Albert Einstein was a womaniser who abandoned his first born to an orphanage etc. etc. Real science depends on the masses of accumulated evidence and not on the foibles of particular people.

Even if it were to turn out that Myers was entirely right and romantic, it would still be as pointless to resurrect his own particular theories, founded as they were on the physics and psychology of a past age, as to resurrect the pholigston theory of chemistry. Perhaps the best summing up of Myers would be that he was a complicated man in a complicated time, dealing with immensely complicated topics which unlikely to be resolved in the lifetime of anyone alive today, more than a century later. -- Peter Rogerson

BUDD HOPKINS - AN ARTIST'S LIFE

Budd Hopkins. Art, Life and UFOs: A Memoir. Anomalist Books, 2009.

Time and again there arise charismatic figures who claim a special gnosis into the human condition, to possess the master key which tells us why it is no go, the cause of the world's heartache and suffering. One such is Budd Hopkins, but in one crucial respect Budd Hopkins and his side kick David Jacobs differ from almost all the rest. For along with this gnosis there is usually a vision of salvation, redemption, utopia, some 'Good News' a gospel which illuminate the path out of the human condition. The road to salvation may be impossibly hard and harsh, the path to the noblest utopian strewn with babies' bones, the final goal as sick and demented as Adolf Hitler's vision of a German master race lording it over a Jew-free Europe, but some goal, some aspiration is offered.

Hopkins' gnosis, that human beings are the helpless playthings of omnipotent, but curiously inept, aliens who can abduct people through solid walls into invisible spaceships, but cannot put the right clothes back on abductees, offers no such solace. Perhaps it is the first true anti-gospel of total despair ever announced. (Some writers such as Bertrand Russell professed despair over the inevitable heat death of the universe, but this event billions of years in the future was not the sort of thing to impact of the lives of most people.)

One is naturally curious as to what drives a person to such beliefs and such despair. It is by no means obvious from this book, though there are clues.

Parts of this book provide fascinating cameos of the social history of Midtown USA from the 1930s to the 1960s; its social mores, its narrowness and bigotries, sexual ignorance and authoritarian parenting. Others provide glimpses into the lives of some of the leading characters of the New York art scene. There is plenty here for the historian to mine. But the coming of the UFOs into Hopkins' life, after his sighting of an unusual object in 1964, seem to mark a change of gear, the beginnings of a sense of mission. However lots of people have had UFO experiences of one sort or another without developing the idea that, unknown to themselves, people are constantly being abducted by aliens. We can trace how this idea slowly develops, yet we never quite gather what that exact processes was.

But as I said there are clues. Hopkins is a survivor of polio which left him with a slight limp, but also memories of painful physiotherapy: "In the ominous context of an echoing, medicinal hospital room, I was stripped of my clothes by a pair of bored strangers, thick waisted nurses who plumped me into a zinc tub of rushing water and ordered me to kick and wriggle my legs. I wept and pleaded to be taken out, a response which naturally strengthened their determination to make me work my weakened limb. It was a battle every time I had to undergo this treatment, and together these sessions comprise one of the most terrifying and humiliating memories of my earliest years" (p17).

The parallels with the abduction narratives are startling; the impersonal examination in an alien setting, the authority figures who are just doing their job, the humiliating procedure for "your own good".

We can certainly understand the enormous emotional resonances that the preexisting narratives must have had for someone with that experience. These narratives were however largely set in a context of remembered UFO experiences. The big step, the idea that beneath the surface of our normal lives, unknown to even ourselves, strange and terrible things might be happening, is Hopkins own personal addition to the narrative.

Is it a coincidence then that beneath the surface Hopkins' own family life of placid bourgeois normality, there lay a truly terrible secret? After a political row with his father when he wass 22, Budd is told by his mother not to judge his harsh authoritarian and bigoted father too harshly, for his father's father had shot his own mother and killed himself, and Hopkins' father had been the one to find the bodies. It is not difficult to imagine what trauma this revelation would have had any young man. Now nothing is ever going to be truly normal and safe and rational anymore. This is a world in which anything can happen. Surely long before the final revelation, there must have been a tacit awareness of some vast untellably dark and forbidden secret, the gap in the collective memory of the family.

It is hard not too sense that he might fear that the ghosts of his authoritarian father and murderous grandfather might haunt his own genes, that the invisible Greys represent a safe target against which this rage and hate can be directed, without hurting real people. Yet surely he above all must sense when hearing David Jacobs raving on about how the hybrids are stealing our women and planning to take over the world, he is listening to his own father's anti-Jewish, anti-Black and anti-Communist rants writ large, and that if this idea went feral nobody would be safe.

The artist Robert Motherwell tells him one day "all artists are monsters", and one wonders if Hopkins has not found the most monstrous form of art yet, the sculpting of other peoples memories into works of art that express his own pain. Of course he doesn't set out consciously to do that, probably he genuinely believes that he is a "good listener" and an empathic healer. But only those who come out with the right stories get that empathy. There is no room for ambiguity, he has the answer, the master key, and any other version is outcast.

There are several hints that Hopkins cannot relate to these people as equal, fully rounded human beings. His relationship with the one abductee who was actually more successful than he was, Whitley Streiber, degenerates into explosive rage. No, he wants dependants. When he hears that the actress and New Age guru Shirley Maclaine has said that she thinks 'Kathie Davies' is just a great actor - it takes an actor to know one - Hopkins comes up with this patronising comment, which does suggest he is his father's son more than he would care to acknowledge: "...there was no way that Kathie, a poorly educated young woman from rural Indiana, with no training as an actress could be that convincing a hoaxer".

Beyond the obvious point that several famous actors have come from far more challenging backgrounds (take Charlie Chaplin and Marilyn Monroe for a start), many feminists would argue that all women have to be great actresses in order to play the many roles life demands of them, and sociologists such as Irving Goffman would say that is true of everyone. After all "all the world's stage, and all the men and women merely players".

Abductionism clearly becomes for Hopkins a fundamentalist religion so, like many fundamentalists, he interprets everything literally. He just cannot grasp that the abduction stories are metaphors for the human condition, hence their great power. Like many fundamentalists he has profound difficulty with ambiguity. The strange, liminal, anomalous experiences and memories which form the base of the abduction mythos, are all homogenised into a standard narrative, interpreted through a narrow ideological lens. In some sense Hopkins himself becomes the clinical Grey, experimenting on people, moulding their memories to a pre-set script, disabusing them of their dreams and fantasies because it is for their own good.

The one person he exempts from this is himself, he clings to his own 'big dream' in which he meets again the artist Franz Kline, 15 years dead as a transcendent experience, even if crafted by his own unconscious. But if one of his abductees had reported this, he would have no doubt dismissed it as a screen memory for abduction by the GFeys, and you can guess what he would have made of a collection of phobias as generous as his mother's.

We should not however see this just as the record of an aberration of one man, but as an awful warning of the power of belief, creed and cause to possess and destroy fundamentally decent people. -- Reviewed by Peter Rogerson.

NURSE, THE SCREENS!

From the August 2009 edition of MUFON UFO Journal, in an article about Bruce Maccabee receiving their "highest award for Excellence in Ufology":

"The only funny thing I can say about Bruce is that he is the the only guy I know who cut his organ in half so he could get it in the back seat of his car ..."

Truly eye-watering!

SATANIC PANIC

Magonia readers may have hoped that the horrific 'Satanic Ritual Abuse' panic, which we helped to expose nearly twenty years ago, was by now totally discredited. As a glance at recent headlines will show there are plenty of horrors for over-worked social workers to deal with, without introducing an entirely mythical element to confuse the issue, and perhaps distract from the real abuse which is taking place every day.

Unfortunately this seems not to be the case. the latest issue of Private Eye magazine (no. 1244, 4-17 September 2009, p.28) reveals that the Satan-hunters are still very active. We are not entirely surprised by this as our correspondent Basil Humphreys reported on a seminar he attended in September 1996, which showed that groups like RAINS (Ritual Abuse Information Network and Support) were still very much around spreading their ideas through the social work network.

Political and current affairs magazine Private Eye explains that the believers are becoming active again, following a period when they went to ground after million-dollar compensation claims were awarded against therapists who implanted false memories of abuse. The S-word was quietly dropped for talk of 'organised' or 'extreme' abuse.

But books and conferences are again full of discussion of 'ritual abuse'. This is now seen in terms of 'Dissociative Identity Disorder', formerly know as 'Multiple Personality Disorder'. The believers claim that abusers use the 'alters' (alternative personalities) to control the victim and make them forget the abuse.

Some of the people associated with the first SRA campaign are active in this revival, including Joan Coleman and Valerie Sinason. Sinason is co-organising a conference on 'Ritual Abuse and Mind Control' in London on 25th and 26th September.

She has a chapter in a new book, Forensic Aspects of Dissociative Identity Syndrome, entitled 'Satanic Ritual Abuse and the Problem of Credibility', although a psychotherapist working at her Harley Street clinic is making a contribution to the London conference entitled 'Just Leave out the Word Ritual'!

Private Eye notes that: "Bizarrely [the book] includes an interview which spells out emphatically [the] total lack of evidence. Chris Healey, a retired head of CID in Portsmouth, described his investigations into five cases of alleged ritual abuse:

"I've never come across a case of ritual abuse that was proven. I've been looking for 15 years, and I've tried very hard to find proof. I've dug up fields, set up cameras, and looked down wells where bones where supposed to have been thrown and I've found nothing that can be independently linked to the allegations. In my experience these allegations have always ended in a dead end".

BIG IN JAPAN

You've probably seen this elsewhere, I've just copied it from the Guido Fawkes political blog:

"PM’s Wife Taken by Aliens on UFO to Venus

"No, really. The new Japanese premier-in-waiting, Yukio Hatoyama, has won an historic election victory over the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party. That is nothing, his wife Miyuki, beat alien kidnappers. In Miyuki’s book published last year (Very Strange Things I’ve Encountered) she claims that “while my body was asleep, I think my soul rode on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus… It was a very beautiful place and it was really green.”

"First Ladies are often “out there”. Nancy Reagan consulted astrologers, Cherie Blair had tantric, naked, in-shower, deep massages with Carole Caplin amongst other fruity new age mumbo jumbo practises. Bet Sarah Brown sometimes wishes she was kidnapped by aliens…"