WIERDNESS UNLIMITED

Marius Boirayon. Solomon Islands Mysteries: Accounts of Giants and UFOs in the Solomon Islands. Adventures Unlimited, 2009

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Joseph P Farrell. Roswell and the Reich: The Nazi Connection. Adventures Unlimited, 2010

A most curious book, a mixture of travel adventure, biography, folklore and classical paranoia. Much of this centres around the author's (mis)adventures in the Solomon Islands, from which he alleges he was forcibly deported by the Australian intervention force. This, I suspect had less to do with his chasing strange lights in the sky, which locals allegedly call Dragon Snakes, and he attributes to UFOs flying from underground bases, than he would have us believe.
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The folklore about the giants, if indeed it is genuine folklore - I have been unable to find references to this outside of pop paranormal websites - is fascinating. The giants would appear to occupy much the same role in local culture as do, say, the fairies of Ireland, and would seem to be euhemised petty supernaturals. The stories of cannibalistic giants, may contain several layers of meaning, as symbols of the voracious forces of nature, the notion of human wildness when separated from social bonds and rules, and mythologised accounts of past ethnic conflicts.

As the book ends, the author seems to fall increasingly into a paranoid world view in which the Australian intervention in the islands is somehow tied up with his own activities, and is aimed at protecting the bases of the secret world government which exist under the Solomons.

Joseph P Farrell. Roswell and the Reich: The Nazi Connection. Adventures Unlimited, 2010

If the author had confined himself to a critical analysis of the evidence surrounding Roswell, this book would not have been without interest, for he is able to show how much of it is secondary and long after the fact, and even then is hardly suggestive of some super-technology capable of traversing interstellar space.

However he goes on into wild speculation about surviving Nazis and their amazing technologies. These technologies of course did nothing to save Hitler and his chief gangsters, did nothing to save Eichmann, or to assist such presumed allies as the Argentine military junta at the time of the Falklands war.

The author presents himself as an anti-Nazi, despite the constant references to the amazing achievements of Nazi Germany and their secret super-technology; which seems to be part of the universal fascination with radical evil, which makes the Nazis one of the prime subjects of high school history in Britain.

Of course the idea of the super conspiracy by the forces of radical evil possessed of superhuman powers is the old witchcraft repackaged. It is perhaps no coincidence that in effect what this book is partly doing is refashioning old antisemitic fantasies right out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, with the word Jew replaced by the word Nazi: the Protocols of the Elders of Nuremberg, presumably!The best one can say to this is that if you must demonise something, the Nazis are better than most - there are not all that many of them, and if they end up getting a good kicking they deserve it.

Fortunately for the peace of mind of the sort of people who take this sort of thing seriously, the evidence that Farrell adduces for the exotic properties of the Roswell debris all turn out to come from revisionist memories years after the event. Contemporaneous sources and actions show otherwise. They are consistent with the actions of people who had only the vaguest idea as to what the words "flying saucer" meant (and certainly not thinking of extraterrestrials or the like), had found no evidence which pointed towards either a secret American or Soviet project or high technology and thought they could earn brownie points by finding a low tech, really mundane answer as to what the "flying saucers" which had been puzzling their colleagues really were, only to be hauled over the coals for compromising an actual secret project. Simples, as the meercat would say. 

• Peter Rogerson.