GHOST HUNTING FOR FUN AND ... ?

John Fraser. Ghost Hunting: A Survivor's Guide. The History Press, 2010

The author is vice-chair (investigations) of The Ghost Club (that faction of the old Ghost Club which allows non-toffs to join) and a member of the Spontaneous Cases Committee of the Society for Psychical Research. His book on ghost hunting does not go into the detailed minutiae of equipment that A Beginner's Guide to Paranormal Investigation reviewed by John Rimmer does, but perhaps provides a broader overview.

He looks at the various groups involved, concentrating on the Ghost Club, Society for Psychical Research and ASSAP, pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of each, and provides much practical advice for ghost hunters, including the types of location to choose and avoid, and times of the year to watch out for. Particularly ghost hunters should avoid half-built follies in the middle of winter, and just about any urban location in the firework season. He also gives much sensible advice on making sure that your teams are small enough to be handled.

Fraser also critically examines the various types of equipment used, and rather suggests that some of these seem to be taken mainly because they look impressively scientific, rather than for their practical use. Much more controversially he seems to be in favour of taking 'psychics' and 'mediums' along. This surely is assuming the answers before asking the questions, and apart from a nod toward the infrasound theories of Vic Tandy there is little attempt to get beyond such folkloric 'explanations' of ghosts such as spirits or the 'stone tape' theory. If it is entertaining stories that will add to the atmosphere, it might be better to hire a local folklorist or story teller, they are likely to be far more professional in their actions, and far less heavy duty.

Of course, looking through the various locales mentioned here, it seems that the main aim of this sort of ghost hunting is having a rather spooky time in 'ye olde haunted spot', reinforcing the folkloric image of ghosts being associated with decaying mansions and country houses, rather than with cinemas, shopping centres, car factories and quite modern private homes. Of course, as Fraser points out, there are a number of practical problems with many of these, as well as ethical problems with the latter.

While this sort of ghost hunting may be good fun for those who take part, Fraser has to concede that they are not at all likely to provide evidence to convince sceptical outsiders that something anomalous is going on, still less what exactly these anomalies might be. -- Reviewed by Peter Rogerson

BLACK DOGS AND ENGLISHMEN

David Waldron and Christopher Reeve. Shock! The Black Dog of Bungay. Hidden Publishing, 2010

A valuable study in the origins of folklore, this book by an Australian academic and a local historian from the town, traces the genesis and evolution of the legend of the Black Dog. The legend originated with a violent thunderstorm in Bungay and the neighbouring town of Blythburgh on the 4th August 1577. In the church of St Mary's Bungay, two men who had gone into the belfry, presumably to ring the bells to ward off the evil spirits of the storm, were killed by a lightning stroke, and several of the congregation were burned on their feet and legs by conducted electricity.

This shocking (in both senses of the word) event became the basis on which a tract was written by one Abraham Fleming, in which it was claimed, that in the midst of the storm, something like a black dog appeared in the church and disported itself among the congregation, killing two men and seriously burning another. This version does not appear in contemporaneous local documents or in Holinshed's Chronicles.

Christopher Reeve traces the local background to this story, and the processes by which it may have originated, placing it in the context of the disorientating religious changes and disputes of the Tudor period, and in rivalries between the two neighbouring churches in Bungay.

David Waldron places the story in the context of the black dog 'experiential folklore' of both this region, and wider and examines the basis of these stories. He makes the point that these stories have mutated over the last 200 years, from Black Shuck being an all purpose shape shifting boggart to that of the modern image of the giant Labrador with large glowing eyes. It is interesting to note that modern 'encounters' with shuck are encounters with this new model shuck, not the old one.

Like much 'traditional' lore the rise of the Black Dog to become the emblem of Bungay is quite modern, mainly due to the activities of a prominent local personality and civic leader Dr Leonard Cane in the 1930s. Cane sought to repackage Bungay as a "historic place" to compensate for the decline of local industries in the depression.

The authors note how even now these tales of black dogs can frighten children, and look for explanations in terms of Jungian archetypes. Another way of looking at these stories might be to see dogs as liminal creatures which straddle the divide between the worlds of the human community and wild nature, creatures of the domestic realm which can suddenly metamorphose into wild beasts. This may have been even more the case in the rural realms where these stories originated, where they were not cosseted lap-puppies but hard working and hunting beasts, and where starvation and ill usage, to say nothing of rabies, may have turned many a dog into something feral and dangerous.

The primal fear behind that of the black dog is that the hunter becomes the hunted, that the hounds which hunt foxes and rabbits and other wild beasts for humans could turn on their owners and hunt them down. The black dog then becomes the symbol of both the ultimate wildness of nature, and of death, merged as the universal predator.

We can then see that the appropriation of the symbol of the black dog for the names of pubs, clubs, sports teams and the like is a sign of the surface domestication, control and disenchantment of wild nature in our own scientific and technical age, but a domestication which is fragile, only just papering over the age old fears.

Though the coverage of the development of the story as folklore and its morphing into popular culture and pop paranormalism is very well covered, there is one aspect of the use of the story which the authors have overlooked, that is the presentation of the Bungay story by meteorologists as an early modern case of ball lightning. Such presentations have tended to take Fleming' story as a fairly literal description of events, a warning example perhaps of taking any of these old texts as literal descriptions of objective reality.

A CONSPIRACY OF CONFUSION

 Guy Patton. Masters of Deception; Murder and Intrigue in the World of Occult Politics. Adventures Unlimited Press. 2009. -- Reviewed by Gareth J. Medway.

When the saga of Rennes-le-Chateau was first made public, in 1956, it was simply said that in 1891 the village priest, Bérenger Sauniere, had found a hoard of buried treasure, along with the exciting suggestion that there might be more gold waiting to be discovered in the vicinity. Then, from the 1960s onwards. publications inspired by Pierre Plantard implied that the real secret was something completely different, the survival of the ancient royal Merovingian dynasty, and its embodiment in Pierre Plantard.

Since then it has been necessary for authors and video-makers to have a `slant', to build the story up to some sensational revelation or other. Henry Lincoln's first BBC programme, in 1972, was entitled 'The Lost Treasure of Jerusalem', a title which speaks for itself. In his second, in 1974 (and also in an unfinished independent documentary soon afterwards), he hinted that Satanism was at the root of the mystery. Finally, he settled on the now well-known hypothesis that the Holy Grail (San Greal), was really the sacred blood line (Sang Real), descendants of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene (meaning, again, Pierre Plantard, who himself, despite his monstrous ego, dismissed this as a bit too ridiculous).

Since then, we have had a huge number of publications, including a glossy magazine format work by two journalists. Jean-Pierre Deloux and Jacques Brétiguy, whose selling point was that they had access to secret documents and photographs supplied by the Priory of Sion, who are supposed to guard 'the truth'; the Fanthorpes, and David Wood, who suggested an outer space connection; and others who claim that the real secret is that the tomb of Mary Magdalene is in the area; or the Holy Grail (meaning this time a physical artefact); or the tomb of Jesus Christ himself; or the entrance to the Hollow Earth; whilst the unique value of Christopher Dawes' 'Rat Scabies and the Holy Grail' was that he was the only researcher to have investigated the mystery in company with the former drummer of The Damned.

Patton's particular position is that he links Berenger Sauniére and the Priory of Sion with political conspiracy theories generally, starting with those about the rise of Christianity, through those about the Merovingians and the Templars which have already been linked to Rennes-le-ChAteau. but then mainly dealing with twentieth century France, and in particular President Mitteirand. How, you may ask at the outset, are all these things connected? Speaking of the court of the last Czar, where esotericism flourished, as exemplified by the 'mad monk' Rasputin, and the forging of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, he admitted that "Geographically, St. Petersburg is a great distance from Rennnes-le-Chateau but that "the network of lodges and secret societies brings them much closer together than the map belies." Consequently, his book is full of phrases like "this labyrinthine world", "Due to the cloak of secrecy", "Conventional historians tend to overlook", "hidden agenda", "clouded in mystery", and so on.

Inevitably, he sees conspiracies where there is no need to postulate them. In 1886 Sauniére was given 3,000 francs by the Countess of Chambord to help with the restoration of his church: "At first sight it appears strange to see such munificence on the part of such a distinguished person as the Habsburg Countess Marie-Thérese towards an unknown, humble priest in a remote backwater, but it soon becomes clear that the same tentacle-like network of connections encountered elsewhere in this story can also be discerned here." In fact. this is one of the few aspects of the saga for which a straightforward explanation is apparent: Sauniére had been suspended from the priesthood for a time far preaching anti-Republican sermons: the countess was the widow of a Bourbon claimant to the throne of France, who had beepn known for making generous donations to the Catholic church to assist with building work.

Though the book is supplied with notes and a bibliography, they are arranged in such a way as to make them almost useless, and there is no index at all, though it certainly requires one, or perhaps a glossary of people and organisations, when dealing with paragraphs like:

"De Chérisey married Gloria and, in the 1970s, they had a son Gaspar. Gaspar's godfather was a US Air Force Colonel John Driscoll said to been involved with NATO Intelligence. Also known as Sean O'Driscoll, he was a member of the chivalric Order of Lazarus and after retirement purchased Castle Matrix in Ireland. These facts have been confirmed by Geoffrey Basil-Smith (who corresponded with De Chérisey from 1982 until his death) from a conversation with Liz O'Driscoll, the late Colonel's widow. The connection between de Cbérisey and a NATO officer is all the more interesting when we leara that the NATO Commander of the Ternplar Order OSMTJ ,whose head was the Portuguese Sousa de Fontes, was particularly active in the movement in the 1980s."

(He could also have mentioned that Basil-Smith, who contributed a Foreword to David Wood's Genisis - which purported to find evidencer of an extraterrestrial conspiraicy in the landscape around Rennes-le-Chateau - was Grand Master of the M.A.A.T. Lodge, a dissident O.T.O. group with links to Gardnerian witchcraft. But perhaps he thought that these facts might confuse his readers a little too much.)

Much about the life of Pierre Plantard rernains obscure. Patton describes the evidence as 'contradictory', but does not help matters, by writing things like: "Plantard was born on 18 March 1920 in Paris, to Pierre, a wine merchant, and his wife, Raulo who died two and a half years later. He was to continue living with his mother until at least 1943." Nor is the following inunediately enlightening:

"But there is a more sinister dimension to these associations that has its roots in the war. Prior to their arrival in Limoges in 1943. the Dagobert family had lived in St. Nazaire at the mouth of the Loire, until forced to move to avoid the massive Allied bombing of the Naval dockyard. As manager of the local undertakers, and as a member of a Masonic lodge Libre Pensée, Robert-René's father was well acquainted with many other locals, including those who worked in the dockyard. Employed as engineers at St. Nazaire were Francois Plantard and Eugene Deloncle, both members of the Societé Anonyme des Chantiers et Ateliers de St. Nazaire-Penhoet. Francois Plantard, as we have seen, was the father of Yannick, who married the adopted daughter of Mitterrand's friend André Rousselet. Eugene Deloncle ran the extremely militant right-wing group La Cagoule, to which Mitterrand is said to have belonged before the war. Furthermore, one of Deloncle's nieces was to marry Francois Mitterand's brother Robert. Another prominent member of La Cagoule was Jean Filiol, the same Milice chief that will be seen to be implicated in the tragic Oradour affair. Jean Filiol and Francois Mitterand, both born at Jarnac, were close friends"

Confused? So am I.

BACK TO THE GOLDEN AGE

Maurizio Verga. When the Saucers Came to Earth: The Story of Italian UFO Landings During the 'Golden Age' of Flying Saucers. Edizione UPIAR, 2007 -- Reviewed by Peter Rogerson

It has taken a good while to get hold of this book but the wait has been worth it. At one level this is a collection of Italian UFO landing cases from 1912 to the end of 1954, at another it is a fascinating journey into cultural history.

Verga provides not only the summaries of these stories, but also many reproductions of illustrations, and notes which track them down to their source and assess their reliability. Some of the stories are well known, others will be scarcely known even to Italian UFO buffs. Among the former is that of 'R. L. Johannis' who is supposed to have encountered a landed UFO and occupant back in August 1947. Verga reveals that Johannis was actually the pen name of a well known science fiction writer and pre-Daniken ancient astronaut enthusiast, Luigi Rapuzzi. His story first emerged as a postscript in an (unpublished) Italian translation of Flying Saucers Have Landed. Not surprisingly Verga labels this as a "possible hoax".

A very definite hoax was that of a classic 'multi witness close encounter' at Tradate , which turns out to have been a quite elaborate prank by some of the young regulars at the local bar, mainly aimed at a hapless local journalists. Such pub pranks were apparently quite a common occurrence in pre-TV Italy. Another notorious hoax of the period was that of the Monguzzi photographs. Both of these hoaxes used quite simple materials and look incredibly naive by today's standards, yet they have fooled a good number of ufologists

Other stories retain much more of their air of mystery, perhaps none more so than that Rosa Lotti of Cennina, who claimed to have met a strange landed object and two dwarfs who grabbed her flowers and one of her stockings, of which Verga provides by far the most detailed account in the English language. This is a story with a strange fairytale atmosphere, seeming far removed from the high tech world of today's ufology. Another even more traditional story is that of the 100 year old farmer Aquilante who claimed to have been kidnapped by two beings who morphed between giants and dwarfs, and either flew him or walked him for miles, a tale reminiscent of being taken by the fairy host and deposited miles away. This might well be the first contemporaneously reported abduction story of the modern age.

Other stories contain images of the technology of the period, UFOs with propellers, rivets, levers and the like, and Verga suggests they are part of the cultural milieu of the period. It is this milieu which is captured by the many illustrations of newspaper clippings, general magazine covers (where flying saucers competed with the photographs of glamorous young ladies for the reader's attention) and science fiction books and comics. These show how the image of the flying saucer had massively permeated popular culture, and that it was drawing at least to some extent on preexisting imagery.

The press of the period seems to have had a very lax attitude; if there wasn't an exiting enough flying saucer story in your neighbourhood, then just make one up. The same has also been reported as occurring in France at the same period.

Another quite separate collection of dubious stories are those 'remembered' often in suspiciously vivid detail, decades after the event. Some of these are among the stories 'collected' (or more likely just made up) by teenage UFO buffs in the 1970s and 1980s, often to get their name in the magazine Il Gionarle dei Mesteri (The Journal of Mysteries), a sort of cross between Fate and Fortean Times.

Both Verga and V. J. Ballester-Olmos who writes the introduction conclude that these stories have much more the properties of "a myth unfolding with the passage of the years" than anything else, though among the things triggering such a myth there may be the occasion genuine anomaly.

This is of course the conclusion that we in Magonia reached about 40 years ago, and in a sense even the crude and rather credulous compilations of these sorts of stories were pointing that way all those years ago.

If there is no unique, physical UFO phenomenon, there is still this extraordinary body of contemporary folklore which remains largely untapped. This is not just an excellent UFO book, it is a work of folklore of outstanding quality.

MONDAY, MONDAY

I thought I'd brighten up a dull Monday morning with this picture! Read the terribly serious articles by our friends Kentaro Mori and Martin Kottmeyer which go with it HERE.

MAGONIA 19, MAY 1985

Magonia 19 featured a cover montage showing a scary looking character at a London tube station, to illustrate Mick Goss's article, 'The Maniac on the Platform', a review of rumours and urban legends, prompted by Mick overhearing a conversation about a series of deadly encounters on tube stations, where innocent passengers were pushed in front of oncoming trains by a madman - a veritable maniac.

Mick linked these stories with other legends such as those involving skeletal passengers in lost trains which have been walled up and abandoned. Mick's article was a comprehensive, well-written study of such irrational fears and rumours ...

... except that a short while after it was published someone actually did get pushed onto the track and killed by a maniac at Wimbledon Station, and another such case was reported in 2004 at Euston, although in the latter case the two women who were pushed onto the line were rescued before being hit by a train. In fairness to Mick, he was looking at a legend which described a series of murders, which were subsequently hushed-up by 'the authorities', rather than a small number of isolated incidents, and his analysis of the way in which such rumours arise and propagate themselves still holds true.

Peter Rogerson's 'Northern Echoes' (which at the time was called 'Northern Echos' as part of Magonia's long-term spelling reform agenda) was rather more successful in anticipating forthcoming events: "I have always felt that John Keel's skills as a writer have been underestimated, and compared with the average blood and guts horror story of the Frank Herbert/Stephen King genre, Mothman Prophecies (which would have made an excellent film) is a masterpiece of understated terror..." It took 17 years after Peter's comment (and 27 years after the book's publication) for Hollywood to take the hint!

Elsewhere in this issue Italian ufologist Maurizio Verga asked what it took to be a UFO researcher, and Shirley McIver considered if ufology could even be described as a science - sort of, seemed to be her conclusion, and John Harney presented us with a complex philosophical consideration of what reincarnation might actually involve.

But the highlight of this issue was a piece by fantasy novelist Robert Rankin (who was at that time a member of Magonia's editorial panel) revealing the secrets of the fabulous Brentford Griffin. Some say this was a crude hoax by the Magonia team to publicize a forthcoming Fortean convention at the legendary Waterman's Art Centre; other say such a complex deception would be far beyond the capacity of a rag-tag gang of drunkards and ledger-clerks.

Labelled 'Great Mysteries of Brentford, No. 23' (the others have vanished into interstices in the space-time continuum) the article revealed the history of the Gryphon - as it is called by the Brentfordians - which has puzzled outsiders since the time of Dr Johnson. Amongst those baffled by its contemporary appearances was "Cockney 'personality' Danny Baker, openly admitting before an audience of several million that the witnesses he had interviewed were genuine...". Rankin added that "since the television coverage Brentford has found itself playing reluctant host to all manner of fringe elements", including "Andy Collins of Green Stone notoriety who arrived hotfoot with ghetto-blaster, Instamatic and the usual bevy of nubile lady acolytes".

As for the First (and only) Brentford Festival of the Unexplained, aka The Wonderfest, the expected millions failed to turn up, preferring to patronise Bob Geldorf's Live Aid event on the same weekend a few miles up the North Circular Road at Wembley. The griffin chose not to put in an appearance.

HISTORY'S MYSTERIES

Brian Haughton. History’s Mysteries: People, Places and Oddities Lost in the Sands of Time. New Page Books, 2010. -- Reviewed by John Rimmer

This book gives straightforward accounts of a variety of historical puzzles, from prehistoric times to the eighteenth century from a conventional historical perspective. Some of these are historical artefacts or events which are often misinterpreted, in some cases deliberately so for political or religious motives, such as attempts to provide alternative histories for the Asoka Pillar and the Taj Mahal in India, the racial controversies surrounding the Great Zimbabwe ruins, and closer to home the historical and political controversy of the Stone of Scone or Stone of Destiny, part of the British coronation ceremony.

Others are just genuine mysteries where the evidence surrounding them is too complex for us yet to have any clear idea of their historical context. A prime example of this is the Gobekli Tepe site in Turkey. This is a massive ritual site built ten thousand years ago, millennia before any comparable constructions, and before the invention of the wheel, the development of agriculture and writing, which was then deliberately buried two thousand years later.

Some of the topics covered here have been covered by earlier ‘fortean’ writers, such as Rennes-le-Chateau, the Newport Mystery Tower and the Oak Island Money Pit. Haughton gives logical and rational explanations for these, although I doubt his down-to-earth account of Rennes-le-Chateau will satisfy many aficionados!

The author also looks at the origins for some mythical and quasi-mythical topics such as the lost land of Lyonesse, the Tower of Babel, and Merlin, seeking any historical events which may have formed the kernel of these stories, and examines how mythic elements have accrued around genuine historical figures like Nero, Boudicca and the Olmecs. There are several subject covered which were entirely new to me, such as the remarkable central European ‘Golden Hats’.

In summary, a good, sound account of 35 historical mysteries, and if Haughton does not ‘solve’ each one, he makes a good job of de-mystifying most of them. This is a book for the general reader with a broad interest in history rather than the hard-core fortean. The only serious complaint I have is the poor quality of the illustrations, which are only in black and white and in some cases heavily pixillated. A few colour plates would have made it a far more attractive book. In its favour there is an extensive bibliography, largely of on-line references (a webography?).

OUR FRIENDS FROM THE NORTH

It was a pleasure last week to meet Clas Svahn and Hakon Blomqvist from the Swedish AFU organisation, on their latest trip to England collecting donations for their important UFO and fortean archive in Stockholm.

This is probably the largest and best organised collection of such material in the world, and amazingly it is partly subsidised by the Swedish government, who pay for three people to help organise the collection as part of the government's 'Phase Three' programme which provides paid staff for voluntary community and cultural organisations in a 'workfare' scheme. Maybe someone should suggest this to our new government (whoever they may be)!

The Magonia Collective was able to provide a fair number of magazines and books for this worthwhile cause and, until there is something of the same size and quality in the UK, I would urge readers who may be discarding items from the collections to contact Clas and his colleagues at afu@ufo.se

Clas and Hakon also brought the latest copy of the Swedish magazine UFO Aktuelt, which has now merged with the Norwegian UFO magazine. The two magazines are printed back-to-back, with a different front cover at each end! As the Swedish and Norwegian languages are mutually understandable, Scandinavian readers have no problems with this.

The Swedish end of the magazine contains one of the most amazing IFO cases I have ever come across. A UFO was filmed near Gothenburg; a strange shaped object with two accompanying discs flying at high speed. It seemed to be leaving a trail of some smokey substance.

When investigator Anders Persson examined the case he found that it was the result of a local radio station which was holding a competition to see how far a garden barbeque could be catapulted through the air from a medieval-style trebuchet! The main object was the barbeque itself, trailing charcoal ash, with two circular sausage grills flying alongside it!

It certainly makes a change from Chinese lanterns!