SERIOUS RESEARCH

You may have noticed that I've added Mike Dash's CFI Blog to the list of recommended reading down the side of this page. This is essential reading for all Magonians and Forteans. I would particularly like to draw your attention to his most recent postings about the Marpingen Apparitions. In his introduction he comments:

I've already mentioned, in these pages, the alarming lack of awareness Forteans show of all the progress being made in the fields of academia. Only rarely does one see purely scholarly works cited in the literature, and this considerably impoverishes us – most obviously because it limits our capacity to understand the subtle underpinnings of a wide range of phenomena.

Today I want to give a solid example of precisely what I mean by taking the first of what I expect will be several looks at a book that Forteans have remained blissfully unaware exists ever since it was published nearly 20 years ago. Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Nineteenth Century Germany [by David Blackbourn] is an extensive, richly-researched account devoted to an undeniably obscure event: the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVM) that supposedly took place in a small German village named Marpingen, in the Saarland, back in 1876 ...

Now I don't want to blow Magonia's trumpet too much (as I've already done that a few posts ago) but I must point out that Peter Rogerson reviewed the book in Magonia 57, September 1996. You can read his review HERE, as I have now placed it on the Magonia Review Archive. Peter pre-echoes Mike Dash when he says:

Marian Visions are now beginning to follow witchcraft into the nimbus of academic respectability - how long before today's visions and beliefs follow? Only when the subjects covered by this magazine are made the subject of studies of this quality will we begin to make some progress

In a posting elsewhere (Serious Stuff) which looks at the difficulties of accessing academic publications, Mike comments:

Academia has long been a little suspicious of the Fortean world, and with some reason. There has always been so much woolly thinking, so many unprovable hypotheses, and so little truck with the scientific method on our side of the academic iron curtain that — setting aside the rationalists at CSICOP — aspiring scholars have chosen to stay well clear of our subject when it comes to selecting areas of study, and most especially when choosing a topic for that most important of academic hurdles, the PhD thesis - a critical decision that can heavily affect one's chances of securing employment thereafter.

At Magonia we like to think that, particularly with the help of Peter Rogerson's erudition, we have played some small part in drawing relevant material from the academic world to the attention of our readers, and assessing its relevance and value to the widest range of Fortean studies. I think a glance through some recent postings on this Blog will confirm this.

We want to make sure that serious researchers are made aware of as much as possible that may be related to their studies, and would ask our readers to let us know of any suitable material which may be of interest. You can e-mail your information to pelicanist@rocketmail.com. Even if we are not able to review everything that is published, we can at least draw it to readers' attention via our Book News blog.

And please read all of Mike Dash's fascinating account of the Marpingen visions, and what Blackbourn's meticulous research has to teach anyone seriously interested in the sorts of phenomena we study, rather than just enjoying them for their entertainment value.

THE STORY OF ISOBEL GOWDIE

Emma Wilby. The Visions of Isobel Gowdie: Magic, Witchcraft and Dark Shamanism in Seventeenth Century Scotland. Sussex Academic Press, 2010

One of the insights that our study of contemporary visions and beliefs has brought is that past traditions may not just be based on literary tradition, but instead founded on actual experience, or remembered experience. If modern abductees and others claim to have actually experienced fantastic journeys, might not those who claimed to have attended witches sabbats have had actual 'virtual experiences' of attending them, rather just repeating what interrogators told them or constructing images from stories they had heard

Emma Wilby takes just such a line, in this exceptionally detailed study of the confessions of the 17th century Scots peasant woman, Isobel Gowdie. Wilby places these confessions and the stories contained within them in the detailed background of their time and culture. She examines the various influences which have been brought to bear, events in Isobel's lifetime (the shattering impact of the civil wars for example), the religious atmosphere of harsh Calvinism, the still often partly-Catholic, partly-'pagan' folk beliefs, the harsh daily lives of the people, the conditions of various members of the community, the role of interrogators etc. etc. She builds up a jigsaw of elements that go to construct Isobel's visionary experiences and memories.

For her, Isobel is at the very least a story teller, the sort of adept of narration so essential in pre-literate communities; a performer whose performance under interrogation may have been literally a performance of a lifetime. Beyond that, Wilby sees her as part of a shamanic tradition, which manifested in this time and place primarily through the fairy faith. This tradition is rooted in the 'secret night journey', in which people believe that while they are apparently lying in bed asleep, either in body or spirit they are engaged in various adventures. She points to several versions of this tradition such as the benandanti of Friuli as described by Carlo Ginzburg, or the Corsican Mazzeri as described by Dora Carrington, or to the persistent notion of the female night journey in the company of the Lady of the Night under various names. A darker version of this host was the Wild Hunt or the fairy sluagh.

Wilby examines the role of charms and curses within the community, and their connection with a 'shamanic' tradition; arguing that malevolent shamanism has been much more widespread than the politically-correct, touchy-feely, planet-loving revisionism by contemporary Westerners would suggest. She also examines the impact of the Christian idea of the personal covenant and marriage with Christ as influencing notions of demonic pacts. She also notes how the idea of Christ or the Archangel Michael as divine warriors could have influenced Gowdie's visions of killing her enemies with fairy arrows.

In the time in which Gowdie lived all unauthorised spiritual visions, even by the most pious, were suspect, visions which incorporates much folk material and which may have had not altogether touchy-feely aims would have been doubly damned. That these visions brought comfort and warmth meant little, for warmth and comfort counted for little in the world of the Calvinist elite.

Wilby considers whether Gowdie could indeed have believed that she served the Christian devil, and considers she might, through that figure may have been a much vaguer and more ambiguous figure than that envisaged by official ideology. We can perhaps go even further. Wilby compares the Presbyterian Church with its rigid repression of folk beliefs as a sort of colonial occupying force. That really does not go far enough; the Calvinist ideology of the Covenantors was one of the most demented ideologies that human beings have ever imagined. It was a totalitarian creed which combined the worst excesses of Stalinism and the Taliban in one package.

To these puritans everything that made human beings human - joy, love, sex, food, music, dance, delight in the natural world, enjoyment - were sins. Human beings were just not good enough, they must be crushed down and forged into New Model people, transhumans to use the modern in-phrase. This ideology, like that of the Taliban, seems to have emerged in response to chaotic times. The world was just getting too wild and a strong fortress of habitat and structure was needed to keep the wilderness at bay. Of course when structures become too tight, then all daylight is shut out and the fortress becomes a dungeon.

That is what the official ideology was doing, trapping the people in a spiritual dungeon, where every single thing that made ordinary human life tolerable was demonised and denounced. If words have any meaning then this official ideology was objectively and radically evil; and the totalitarian God whom it forged in its own image, who created millions or billions of people for the sole purpose of torturing them for ever and ever was a God of radical evil. If the official ideology worships a God of radical evil, then whatever spiritual force it proclaims as its enemy is going to be envisioned as the people's protector and the force of good. This 'devil' to Isobel and her people may well have been the 'old' God the Father or Jesus or Michael of gentler times.

In these times the people may well have little faith in the official heaven (as boring as the Kirk perhaps) and look towards the Elfame, which rather like Cockayne or the Big Rock Candy Mountain was a peasants' and workers' paradise in which all physical needs were met, a place of "joyous fairies" - a sort of early modern vision of the consumer society.

Unable to physically fight the oppressive apparatus it might well be that people like Isobel became 'warriors of the imagination', fantasising about taking down the rich and powerful. This may well have been a very morally ambiguous vision, or perhaps better still a wholly amoral one, reflecting the capricious forces of wild nature which need constant appeasement.

Whether this means that Isobel was a member of a 'dark shamanistic cult' is a little more moot, and at times in does seem as though Wilby can erect huge towers of speculation on minimal evidence. The other cavil I have of this book is that while it fashioned around Isobel's confessions these are only presented in 17th Century Scots, rendering them virtually inaccessible to many readers. It would have helped to have a modern translation, if only in the endnotes.

These quibbles should not blind to us to the realisation that this is a very important study of visionary experience and many of Wilby's arguments will have application far beyond studies of 17th century witchcraft. As Magonia readers know, visionary experience, the spontaneous imagination, 'virtual experience', or whatever you want to call it, is alive and well, though its contents are very different.

JOURNEY'S END

Chris Impey. How it Ends: From You to the Universe. W. W. Norton, 2010

Just to cheer you up in this time of recession, here is a book on life and death, mainly the latter, from our own death, (which if we suffer from cardiac arrest, will be hastened by an over liberal application of neurone-frazzling oxygen, ice packs are better), through the extinction of species including our own, through the extinction of life on earth, the death of the earth, the sun, the galaxy and the cold, cold decay of the universe.

Astronomer Chris Impey takes you through all these happy prospects in turn. You might like to know, or not probably, that Gaia enthusiast James Lovelock thinks that it is already too late to prevent global warming, that within 20 years we will all be doomed, DOOMED (in the melifluous voice of John Laurie). Optimists may note that exactly the same thing was said in the 1970s and we are still here.

Not to worry though, there are still the doomsday viruses and the rogue nuclear weapons, and those nasty old asteroids and even nastier comets, the sort of thing that if it hit Neasden it would wipe out Inverness (and if you are in Moscow make sure you are in that nice artistic metro).

The odds against some of these disasters happening now are pretty large, probably a good deal less than being done in by a pot of paint falling from the top shelf, but sooner or later, however much we transhumanise ourselves into Star Trek's 'Seven of Nine', something will get us. If all else fails the sun's expansion will do old earth in, in a couple of billion years time, and if we escape that in some super spaceship, there is the universal death of the stars, the decay of matter and the evaporation of the black holes, which will make everything pretty bleak in about a googleplex years time, though by that time the dark energy may have ripped everything including your transhumanised plastic gut apart.

But not to worry, because there is the suggestion that we are all simulations in a giant computer (presumably one of those entombed in a glacier of solid hydrogen), in which case the operator could get bored and just press the 'delete' key.

This is one of a number of books cataloguing the various potential ends of all things produced in the last few years, which suggests that they appeal to a general sense of unease and cosmic angst. Memento mori for our time perhaps, hinting at the transience of the consumer capitalist culture now approach the end of its sell by date.

NASTY LEGENDS, URBAN RUMOURS

Gillian Bennett. Bodies: Sex, Violence, Disease and Death in Contemporary Legend. University Press of Mississipi, 2005

Though some time has elapsed since this book was published, it has only just come to my attention and is sufficiently important to note. In many respects this book marks a sharp contrast to Gillian Bennett's first book Traditions of Belief. which looked at the ghostlore of middle aged women in Greater Manchester, rather gentle and comforting traditions and experiences. This volume, to the contrary, deals with the dark side of contemporary legend.

Such legends are often presented as forms of comic entertainment, but as Gillian Bennett points out these stories are far from comic, entertaining or the stuff of gentle childhood tales. They are narratives of fear, hate and prejudice with the power to damage and even take lives.

Bennett deals with a series of dark and often subtly interconnected themes, such as stories of the 'bosom serpent', tales which involve the ingestion of some foreign body, usually a live one, such as a snake or insect, which proceeds in some way to eat up its victim from the inside; or the 'deadly fair thing', typified by the posh dress which has come off a corpse and which kills its new live wearer by seeping embalming fluid into her body.

This leads Bennett into a general examination of the whole range of legends of woman as polluter and destroyer. Related to that is a second range of stories of deadly sex, the person who deliberately infects others with an incurable, usually sexually transmitted disease, today most often AIDS. Another set of dark tales consist of the reverse of the prodigal son, a returning son who comes home wealthy but in disguise, but is murdered by his own parents, thinking him a rich stranger.

Thus to perhaps the darkest tales of all, those which tell of the desperate doings of the terrible Others, the foreigners who stalk the land trying to steal our, or our children's organs, to the bloody Blood Libels told against the Jews, onwards to the vision of the murdering anti-society.

All these themes Bennett traces backwards, showing that they are persistent narratives in the human imagination, and echo around certain common themes, that of pollution, loss of bodily integrity, the contaminating presence of the dead, the grim vengeance of fate, fear of strangers, and fear of being dragged back into the wilderness.

Bennett is rather sceptical of grand psycho-sexual explanations, but this sort of material can be very tempting. Two themes seem to run through them, fear of the wilderness and fear of death. The bosom serpent tales suggest that some secret wild thing has been ingested into the very core of the victim's being, turning them into something other (the serpent tales often stress the inordinate but unsatisfying appetite of the victim); the honey trap dress and related tales hint at the envy of the dead, who seek to take the living into their own realm - it is as if the dead have given something of their own in order to lure the living into their realm.

Those who stalk the land, infecting us with their own death, seeking our own vital life-giving organs, draining our blood, are also the dead, now represented by those in the liminal state between life and death (the person dying of AIDS or organ failure for example) In the closely related alien abduction legends, not covered by Bennett, the 'aliens' are often portrayed as having many aspects of the dead about them and come from a dead or dying wasteland, and in need of the life and emotions of the truly living. In the blood legends the Other becomes cognate with the dead (note for example that medieval Christians often regarded Judaism as a dead religion, superseded by the living Christ).

In some ways the most anomalous tale in this collection, that of the returning son murdered by his parents, contains echoes of the return from the dead. Perhaps in some original version the son really is some unholy revenant, who by playing a trick on the parents, tempts them to the worst possible crime, and thus ensures their damnation. Though this tale has been incorporated into high art it no longer features in modern lore, perhaps it is too contrived. A more plausible modern version would perhaps involve a drunken driver running down and killing their own child,

The realm of the Other is also the realm of the absolute wilderness, the demonic anti-society at the heart of the witchcraft fears ancient and modern; the cannibalistic, baby-killing, incestuous, promiscuous chaos, represents the rejection of all the values which make humans human. They become the realm of the totally antihuman, a regression to a wilderness which is not part of any orderly ecosphere, but a realm of total formless chaos.

The fears of sexuality lie not only in the misogynist portrayal of women as insatiable forces of wild nature, but in a recognition of the ambivalent status of reproduction itself, for every child born, someone has to die to make room for them life and death, creation and destruction are one and the same thing.

Bennett warns us not to automatically assume that the subjects of contemporary legend are false, and folklorists not to set themselves up as debunkers. The contents of the stories may be usually false, but they point to ancient and dark places. There really are ghosts and boggarts and horrors, dead things which clutch out to the living, wild things which seek to destroy the ordered world. Many of these stories, reeking of misogyny, homophobia, racism, all sorts of dead and decaying hates and fears which won't lie down, are themselves the pollutants, the snake in the gut, the poisoned honey, the corrupting, destroying, walking dead.

ALIENS AMONG US?

Mac Tonnies. The Cryptoterrestrials: A Meditation on Indigenous Humanoids and the Aliens Among Us. Anomalist Books, 2010.

Before his sad and untimely death last year, Mac Tonnies had been intriguing ufologists with his idea that UFOs were the product of some quasi-human community sharing the planet with us. This book, extracted from his computer files, presents some of these ideas.

The term 'book' is perhaps a misnomer, for what is presented in this short booklet is less a single co-ordinated book than what look like synopses for a number of different books which would have taken his ideas in different directions.

It is clear that he never developed any clear picture of what these cryptoterrestrials were supposed to be. Were they inhabitants of some parallel world, quasi supernatural entities, or flesh and blood creatures related to human beings? This of course demonstrates just how chaotic and inconsistent any hypotheses is going to be which takes the huge variety of UFO stories at face value. It demonstrates to me the sheer pointlessness of invoking non-human intelligences of unknown nature and powers to explain anomalies.

The paws-and-pelts, nuts-and-bolts version of this hypothesis has the obvious problem of complete lack of physical evidence. How could a technological community exist which left no trace of its presence? Tonnies answer seems to have been to invoke mental powers and psychic technologies, in other words magic. We are clearly not far from the realm of Harry Potter here.

In some senses Tonnies was entering into very dangerous ground, for if we conjure up the idea of a group of strangers possessed of magical powers, passing themselves off among us and infiltrating society, we are descending into the mad world of the sort of racist fantasies which in the past have surrounded the image of the Jews or the Gypsies. We all know where that got us.

Tonnies central error is the euhemerism, in which the creatures of the human imagination, which are personifications of the forces of wild nature, are reduced to historical and geographical entities. The few anecdotes presented (such as that of the 'memory' or vision of the encounter with "the god of the flowers") point to a very different realm for cryptoterrestrials, creatures who share our world because they live in the human imagination, rather than caves under the earth. - Peter Rogerson

BEEN THERE, DONE THAT

Marie D Jones and Larry Flaxman. The Deja-Vu Enigma: A Journey Through the Anomalies of Mind, Memory and Time. New Page Books, 2010.

If you start reading this review and suddenly think that you have read it all before, then you are having an experience of deja-vu. If you start reading this review and suddenly think that you have read it all before, then you are having an experience of deja-vu. This the eerie sense of having seen, experienced or encountered a scene or experience before, or where strange places never before visited look or feel unaccountably familiar.

This experience is beginning to gain the attention of psychologists and neurologists and some of their findings are presented in the early part of the book. Suffice it to say that there is no agreement, with a variety of neurological and psychological explanations being given. It is also clear that these experiences are not all the same, and the general deja-vu experience has been divided into a number of components.

The lack of obvious explanations for deja-vu has led to searches for paranormal ones, and these have included reincarnation and precognition, and now it looks as though parallel worlds is the paranormal explanation of choice.

Obviously the only way one could decide whether there was any need to entertain such radical ideas, would be if deja-vu experiences could be shown to anything more than subjective experiences. While it is sometimes claimed that people knew what they were going to encounter next and so on, these are always reported after the fact (often years later) and may themselves be artifacts of memory.

These themes are not gone into much here, for about a third of the way through the book the authors seem to have realised that they are not going to have enough material to fill a book, and then start wandering off into all sorts of side topics, ranging from a general account of memory and its pathologies (which at least had relevance), to rambling discussions of the paranormal, including a section on spells, and several pages devoted to a variety of paranormalists' opinions on ghosts. Needless to say skeptics do not get a word in edgewise.

I have to say that this read less like a properly crafted book, and more like snippets of information and opinion cut and pasted together. -- Peter Rogerson

AUTHORS OF THE IMPOSSIBLE

Jeffrey Kripal. Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred. The University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Jeffrey Kripal is a professor of philosophy and religious thought at Rice University in Houston Texas, and the author of a book, among others, on the Esalen Institute. Here he is concerned with 'the impossible', the varieties of anomalous personal experience which challenge not just contemporary science's view of the universe, but the whole world of daylight reason and commonsense. These themes, and the group of authors he chooses to exemplify them are encountered while doing research for a book on American comic superheroes. He cannot understand why his colleagues in the field of religious studies have not heard of them, or the phenomena they discuss.

The four writers he chooses to discuss are probably known, at least by repute by many Magonia readers: F. W. H Myers, Charles Fort, Jacques Vallée and Bertrand Meheust [left]. As these were all writers whose work has had some influence, direct or indirect on the paths which Magonia has taken, I was looking forward to Kripal's take on their work. There are indeed some valuable insights here, and fascinating biographical asides. On the other hand, far from clarifying any of their viewpoints, Kripal tends at times to make them more obscure. Whether this is because he is trying to express insights for which there is no adequate vocabulary, or because he is tailoring his text to an academic audience for which the obscurity of a private tongue, such as the special languages sometimes used by the world's religious, conveys the sense that one is privy to a special esoteric knowledge.

They are, of course, very different writers, Fred Myers, though much out of fashion now, was one of the leading intellectuals of his time, and his inclusion here is a reminder of a time when psychical research was at the core of psychological study. Charles Fort was a collector of unusual facts, and either a significant precursor to what has become known as post-modernist thought, who used the humour of staged silliness to make his points, or a complete crank.

Jacques Vallee is an astronomer and computer pioneer, who has written a number of popular books on UFOs. While Meheust has also written a couple of fairly popular and influential books on UFOs (though only known in the English speaking world through the mediumship of Hilary Evans!) the main works for which he is known in France are a huge two volume opus on what became known in Britain as 'the higher phenomena of hypnotism' - the paranormal powers and wild talents allegedly demonstrated by the hypnotised, or to use the old term 'magnetised' - and the biography of one of the wildest of these wild talents, Alexis Didier. Needless to say neither of these works are available in the English language.

Haunting the chapters on Vallée and Méheust are the ghosts of Allen Hynek and Aimé Michel, trying to balance the scientific and occult with perhaps little success. Michel is another of those enigmatic French figures, only a small proportion of whose work has been translated into English. Like many of the writers in these fields he had a vision of a directed evolution of humanity, but like many who want to believe in a guided universe he was confronted with the terrifying mystery of the total amorality of wild nature, responsible for the suffering of animals, and his own crippling polio. I am, incidentally surprised that as a student of religion Kripal does not connect Michel's visions back to those of Teilhard de Chardin.

These writers then make something of a strange quaternary, but what unites them for Kripal, is that they tackle the impossible head on, and he would argue that they share his own discontent with 'materialism' and perhaps the whole modernist worldview, and he uses their works as a springboard for a personal quest for that transcendent reality. This may at times involve reading into some of the authors, especially Fort, things which are not there.

One can sense how as a neophyte, Kripal is swept up by this realm of the fantastic, one hears through the book a sort of huge chorus of 'gee whizz'. This stuff is for the cloistered academic the 'fearful' (or as Kripal puts it "fucking terrifying") and fascinating mystery of the numinous, the encounter with the wholly other. It is fascinating because it evokes the promise of transcendence and escape from the routines of bourgeois life, and terrifying because it could take away their professional careers, and as the history of these subjects show, their very sanity. It contains within itself the heady addiction of the transgressional.

Perhaps also as a neophyte, Kripal tends to view some this 'impossible' in a rather literalistic light, even though at some level he is aware of the dangers of this. Evoking for example literalistic interpretations of these stories, and looking for explanations (extraterrestrials, spirits, the brain as a radio receiver of conciseness, hidden dimensions etc...), merely drags one down into the realms of what Fort called the "old dominant". Furthermore the ideologies of psychical research, ufology, cryptozoology and etc. operate on just the same exclusionary principles as that of the cultural mainstream.

Kripal distinguishes between the 'psychic', which seeks the scientification of the realms of the impossible which were once in the domain of science, while the 'paranormal' leaps into the world of 'science mysticism', though a better description might be that it is the translation into popular culture.

If these 'impossible' events which his authors discuss are signs of transcendence, then it is a transcendence which changes or manifests itself differently over time. In the world in which Myers lived, and which Méheust writes about in his major books, this transcendence takes the form of extraordinary human abilities and relationships: the clairvoyant who can cross the seas in his mind and tell you just what is in your study all those miles away; the love affair after death; the ghostly figures in the candle-lit corridors; the medium levitating through the open window.

By the time Fort writes, in the chaotic start of the 20th century, the transcendent is simply a wild rule-breaking anarchy of lights in the sky, poltergeist girls, falls of frogs and toads. For Vallee the scientist and technologist, they are a magical technology, that they are a 'technology I' (i.e. within my zone of speciality) is something he insists upon.

This 'impossible' manifests itself in the language of the moment. It is a Marian apparition to pious Catholics; it is the result of witchcraft to early modern peasants; it is the spiritual telegraph in the mid-19th century. It is the spiritual radio in the late 19th century, phantom airships, biological absurdities in the age of biology, fantastic aircraft and spaceships. It is as though it is something from the deepest collective imagination, which appears refracted through various cultural lenses.

Interestingly Méheust takes the view that some kind of fork was taken in the road which banished the magical powers of the seers. If such a fork was taken, I doubt it was by some decision of a committee of academe, rather it must have been that society developed along urban and industrial lines, that in such a case the vision of the impossible born out of the intimate face to face society faded away. Magonia can now only appear as a machine, but what will replace the machine in the post industrial age? -- Peter Rogerson.

HIGH STRANGENESS & HIGH HOPES

Philip J. Imbrogno. Files from the Edge: A Paranormal Investigator's Explorations into High Strangeness. Llewellyn, 2010

High Strangeness is certainly not an understatement, as much of the material in this book consists of the sort of stories you used to hear on the fringes of UFO group meetings, and which most people walk away from, having shut their ears several minutes earlier. Imbrogno is either open-minded enough or credulous enough (you pays your money and takes your choice) to document some of these stories.

These range from all sorts of night-boggarts hanging around deserted farms, turn of the 20th century Satanists in haunted mines, a guy who claims to be a 'walk-in' Tibetan Master (a story fairly obviously poached from the notorious Cecil Hoskins aka Lopsang Rampa), all the way to the chap who claims to be travelling back and forth in time, and how he is going to be sent back in time to defuse a nuclear bomb set by a terrorist named Carlos in 2012 (of course). The story comes from 1982 when Carlos the Jackal (remember him) rather than bin Laden was the terrorist bogey of the time.

It is difficult to assess any of these stories, some of those involved may have a variety of not always well understood sleep disorders, others may have serious psychiatric problems and others simply over-active imaginations. Definitely one for those who find the writings of John Keel too tame by half!

Michael A. G. Michaud. Contact with Alien Civilizations: Our Hopes and Fears About Encountering Extraterrestrials. Copernicus Books, 2007

Those who want a more considered view of controversial phenomena might prefer this title.

A detailed summary of the many views and beliefs about contact with extraterrestrial civilizations, pointing out the many hidden assumptions held by all sides in this debate and covering all aspects from the chances of extraterrestrial intelligence actually occurring to how we should respond if we do have a contact. What emerges from the overview is just how naive many of the people in this field were and are.

Some clearly believe that ETs will be basically Californians only nicer, and it will be just so easy for us to decode their signals and gain the secrets of the stars. Other commentators, especially those from a biological rather than an astronomical background are much less sanguine. As much as anything this survey provides an insight into our own hopes and fears, and changing responses to technology. Recommended to anyone interested in this topic. -- Peter Rogerson.

400 NOT OUT!

I just thought I'd blow our own trumpet for a moment, by pointing out that Magonia's archive over at Magonia Online has now clocked up just over 400 articles, taken from back issues of Magonia and MUFOB from 1968. Combine this with more than 175 book reviews, many of which are significant feature articles in themselves, posted at our review archive HERE and I think Magonia must by now have one of the most comprehensive archives of UFO and fortean articles freely available on the Internet.

78 authors are represented in the archive, including some of the most famous names in the UFO world, including Jerome Clark, David Clarke, Hilary Evans, John Keel, Eddie Bullard and Martin Kottmeyer.

But this is by no means complete. There is still a great deal to archive, particularly from the more recent issues of Magonia, but we are still adding historical material from the 1960s and 1970s which appeared in Merseyside UFO Bulletin and MUFOB. And the Book Review archive has only just scratched the surface of the wealth of UFO and related topics reviews which have appeared in our pages over the years. Onward and upward!

WITCHCRAFT REVIVAL

David Waldron. The Sign of the Witch: Modernity and the Pagan Revival. Carolina Academic Press, 2008

This interesting, if at times academically opaque study, traces the developments in the understanding and social imagery of 'the witch' and witchcraft from 17th century onwards, charting the decline in the intellectual respectability of the idea of witchcraft, the rise of notions of witchcraft beliefs being primitive survivals from a barbaric past, through to the rise of romantic interest in the subject. Through the 19th century folklorists began to develop ideas, inspired by Darwin and the new geology that the beliefs of the rural masses represented 'prehistoric survivals' or intellectual 'living fossils'. Romantics used these ideas to speculate on the pagan origins of many local customs (which in reality were rarely likely to be more than 300 years old), and thus writers like Jules Michelet, Charles Leland and Margaret Murray conceived the notion of witchcraft as a surviving prehistoric cult.

It was perhaps inevitable that in reaction against the repressive Victorian and post-Victorian morality and the often drab urban landscape all sorts of groups grew up urging ideologies of returning to nature and back to the land. Gerald Gardener's Wicca was very much in this tradition, though Gardener posed as an anthropologist studying an existing cult, rather than the creator of a new religion.

By the mid 1960s academic historians such as Hugh Trevor-Roper and Norman Cohn discounted Margaret Murray's thesis of an actual witch cult based on a pagan survival, but they substituted a view which saw the witchcraft persecutions as precursors of the great state persecutions of the twentieth century. Against this totalitarian darkness stood the enlightenment forces of liberal democracy and daylight reason and commonsense. The ideas which had defeated witch beliefs could be marshalled to defeat the new menaces.

'Feminist witches' were able to use several of these themes, to construct the idea of either a female led witchcraft cult, or women folk healers, or proto-feminists, or just women in general being persecuted by the forces of state/church patriarchy in the 'Burning Times'. If writers like Norman Cohn had seen the witchcraft persecutions as part of the tradition of the demonisation of the 'other' which would find its ultimate expression in the Shoa, many feminists took this ancestry much more literally, and constructed the 'myth of the nine million'.

As historians began to challenge the myths of the pagan survival, the burning times and the nine million, and to argue that the neo-pagan religions were modern inventions, some neo-pagans took this on board but others retreated into post-modernist arguments about "my history" and so. Waldron effectively argues that much post-modernism is in fact simply repackaged romanticism. Equally mythical though is the idea that witchcraft beliefs and witchcraft persecutions were the product of 'medieval superstition'. They had been endorsed by almost all the leading intellectuals of the 16th and early to mid 17th century, yet within the space of perhaps two generations, as far as educated opinion was concerned, no-one could understand how anyone could ever have believed in such ideas.

The decline cannot be something as simple as the retreat before mechanical philosophy and enlightenment ideas, because changes must already have taken place in society and the intellectual climate to create the space in which new ideas could develop, and to some extent the decline in witchcraft prosecutions in Britain precedes the full development of the new philosophy. A more plausible explanation may be simple exhaustion. The new idea of polite society and the reaction against 'enthusiasm' and 'fanaticism', and against the genocidal religious wars of the preceding two centuries.

SECRETS AND ILLUSIONS

David V Barrett. The Atlas of Secret Societies: The Truth Behind the Templars, Freemasons and Other Secretive Organisations. Godsfield, 2008

Despite the presence of a number of small maps, this is not in any meaningful sense an atlas, it is however a coffee-table book which unlike many of its kind is written by someone who knows what they are talking about, and provides eminently sensible and rational information on a variety of organisations and traditions which are often the subject of the wildest conspiracy theories.

Unlike some of the other 'skeptical' writers on this subject, David Barrett, a frequent contributor to Fortean Times, does not have some theological axe of his own to grind. The book covers a wide range of occult and related organisations from the Masons to the Golden Dawn, all the way to the Triads and the Yakusa. Excellent debunking of Rosslyn Chapel and Rennes-le-Chateau.

Monte Cook. The Skeptics Guide to Conspiracies. Adams Media, 2009
A rather superficial and at times light-hearted look at the main conspiracies theories, both reasonable and completely wild. While Cook takes a generally skeptical view of these theories, he cannot be said to have done any significant research on any of them.

Any skeptically inclined book like this, especially if it is a library copy, runs the risk of being vandalised by barmpots writing in it in red ink. This book saves them the trouble, and provides its own red ink comments, some almost as crazy as the real thing.

Richard L Gregory. Seeing Through Illusions. Oxford University Press, 2009
For anyone studying the sorts of subjects covered by Magonia or Fortean Times a study of the physiology and psychology of perception is essential. and Richard Gregory, Emeritus Professor of Neuropsychology at the University of Bristol is one of the world's leading experts on this.
In this book he summarises what is know about the psychology and physiology of perception, and in particular what perceptual illusions can tell us about the perceptual process. Not always easy going but well worth the effort.

NORTHERN FRIGHTS AND OTHER SITES

Jan-Andrew Henderson. Edinburgh, City of the Dead. Black & White Publishing, 2010.

Ron Halliday. Edinburgh After Dark. Black and White Publishing, 2010.

Peter Underwood. Haunted London. Amberley, Rev. Ed., 2010.

Tony Broughall and Paul Adams. Two Haunted Counties. Limbury Press, 2010.

What is behind the massive explosion of local ghost books over the past few years? My colleague Peter Rogerson, who is a local history librarian, sees it as an offshoot of the growth in local history and genealogy. As the world becomes more open and 'globalised', so people seek to preserve an identity in family and locality. Peter has written, and I can confirm it from my own professional experience, that when people come into a library enquiring about "the history of my house", the majority of times they are actually wanting to know who died there and might now be haunting it! The collection of books under consideration here will certainly help in that quest.

The two Edinburgh titles take rather different approaches. Jan-Andrew Henderson's City of the Dead is a rather broader overview of a huge range of strange phenomena, legends, rumours and accounts of experiences from a city know to many as the 'Athens of the North' for its intellectual heritage from the Age of Enlightenment. Before that period though, Edinburgh was a very dark place

Like most English people my knowledge of Scottish history is vague - a few battles, which mostly we won (one they won and they're still singing about it!), Macbeth, something about Mary Queen of Scots, then it's kilts and haggis all the way down

This book should straighten out a few misconceptions. The author's description of 'Early Modern' (i.e. 14th - 17th Century) Edinburgh presents an image that makes downtown Mogadishu on a bad night look like a walk in the park. And such a history of violence, death and degradation leads to lots of extremely frightful ghosts, scary people and spooky places. The author conducts 'Haunted Edinburgh' walks, and judging by the easy, conversational style of this book, they must be great fun

Halliday's book is much more in the the 'paranormal researcher' mode, rather than the 'tour guide'. As well as a collection of traditional tales and legends, a great deal of it involves the author and his colleagues' own investigations into phenomena in the city and suburbs. As well as the traditional legends in includes account of local UFO sightings (Halliday is author of two books on Scottish sightings), poltergeists and spiritualism

Peter Rogerson's customers looking for the 'history' of their house or street would be well served by Tony Broughton and Paul Adams's book - if they lived in Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire, as this is very much in the 'gazetteer' style. It would seem that this collection was compiled originally in the 1970s by local ghost hunter Tony Broughall, a member of the Ghost Club. It has the advantage of including many cases of hauntings that the author has investigated personally as well as historical reports and local rumours and legends. Certainly a very useful contribution to the 'local history' genre of ghostlore

Peter Underwood's book is is a revised edition of the 1973 publication and very much in the 'gazetteer' mode. Underwood's ghosts usually seem to be in the classical tradition: frock-coated Victorians, Elizabethan aristocrats, poor chambermaids, cowled figures, etc., with few unruly teenage poltergeists. Nevertheless it is a comprehensive collection, and there are a few unusual phantoms here, such as the ghostly bus of North Kensington and/or Dollis Hill which has featured in the UFO literature from time to time and may have been the inspiration for Harry Potter's triple decker vehicle. Also intriguing is the ghostly chicken which allegedly haunts Pond Square, Highgate, surely the oddest of the capital's phantoms!

Although all these titles will be of interest to readers in the localities the cover, they all suffer to a greater or lesser degree from a lack of documentation or references for further reading, so the cases mostly come across as a series of unattributable stories. We really need more than short reading lists if these books are intended to be more than light entertainment, and only the Beds and Herts book has anything like a useful index -- but maybe these are just the cavils of a grumpy ex-librarian. -- John Rimmer

THE DEATH OF UFOLOGY (P92)

Gradually the 'Make Ufology History' message seems to be getting across, even on the other side of the Atlantic. Veteran (and pretty sensible) Canadian ufologist Chris Rutkowski is beginning to say what we've been saying for years, ufology is on its last legs. I'm taking the extreme liberty of reproducing his piece "The Demise of Ufology" here, but I strongly recommend his blog as a whole for its interesting and rational approach: http://uforum.blogspot.com/

Here's what he has to say:

I caused a bit of a stir several months ago when I called UFO case investigation a lost art. I'll go further this time: ufology looks like it's near death.
The bad news is: I'm an optimist.

I was having a conversation with Brian Savage recently, and he made the observation that the UFO phenomenon has ben derailed. He was formerly with the Alberta UFO Study Group, an earlier incarnation that produced in-depth investigation reports and scoured government documents for historical Alberta cases. Brian's comment was in reference to the many popularized UFO-related developments over the past 20 years which have destroyed the legitimacy of serious UFO research.

Examples of these derailments include the alien autopsy film, Lazar's Element 115, the strawberry ice cream nonsense, Greer's telepathic vectoring of UFOs, crop circles, exopolitics, Nibiru, and the resurgence of the contactee phenomenon. These and others have served to draw public and popular attention away from serious UFO case investigations and into the realm of wild arm-waving speculation and wide-eyed fanaticism.

It's too bad; it really looked like there was something developing there, for a while.

UFO cases themselves have radically shifted characteristics. Things seemed so simple when Hynek formulated his Close Encounter classifications: CE1 was a sighting at close range; CE2 was a trace case; and CE3 involved seeing occupants. There was no CE4 or CE5, as adopted by some ufologists now, reflecting abductions and contactee incidents. Only three categories, nicely defined and delineated.

The CE2s went extinct first. Ted Philips had several thousand physical trace cases documented by the time crop circles arrived on the scene. Then - poof! No more CE2s. People stopped seeing UFOs landing and taking off; aliens stopped landing their scout craft and leaving behind scorched patches and tripod marks in fields. Instead, mysterious circles (and later, patterns) appeared, almost always without accompanying UFO sightings, and it was assumed that the aliens were using some kind of "rotating vortex" to power their ships.

Then the CE3s went AWOL. No more sightings of landed UFOs where entities were seen exiting and re-entering their crafts. Instead, abductions ballooned in number, eventually overtaking classic CE3s. Really, have you heard of a decent CE3 case recently? No bedroom visitations, no alien faces in windows, no telepathic instructions about saving the human race. Just a simple CE3 observation. No? No.

Even CE1s are mostly gone now, too. Instead, we have YouTube videos of "mysterious orbs" and "Galactic Lightships" seeming to dance all over the pace because the witness couldn't hold the video camera steady. On the other hand, we have goofballs with too much time on their hands using video toasters to create obvious hoaxed UFO videos that experienced UFO investigators can tell are not worth bothering with but go viral anyway, getting retweeted and reblogged everywhere by UFO fans.

But a well-witnessed, well-investigated CE1 case? Rarer than a straight-talking politician or oil executive. Sure, if you look at popular UFO websites that list UFO reports, there are dozens and dozens from all over the world, posted by witnesses. But follow-up to get additional details to make an evaluation, such as direction of movement, where the UFO was in the sky compared with other things, and even an accurate time? Forget it. Onsite investigation? Impossible. Referral to one of the few reliable UFO investigators who lives nearby the witness, to allow proper investigation? Can't, sorry; privacy of witnesses is guaranteed.

So what we have in ufology today is the maintaining of a high number of UFO sighting reports, but a decrease on information content of the cases. Public attention surges when UFO stories in the news go viral, but critical thinking goes out the window.

Part of this is because no one person is viewed as someone who can speak for ufology today. Following the death of Allen Hynek, no one was easily identifiable as someone to take his mantle. (Not even Philip Mantle.) Not Stan Friedman, not Jerome Clark, Mark Rodeghier, not Jenny Randles, not Kevin Randle, not Bill Birnes, not any other of the dozen or so who might (or might not) fit the bill.

(Similarly, who speaks for debunkery? After Phil Klass passed away, is it now Phil Plait? James Oberg? James Randi? Bill Nye? Even Larry King can't decide who is an authority and whom to have on as guests to debate UFOs.)

Poor MUFON and CUFOS, the few remaining doggedly determined UFO groups. They're hanging on, with declining revenue, losing staff and trying desperately to carry on with serious UFO study, when UFO fans have not the slightest interest in that.

Ufology is greatly fractured. With thousands of UFO-related web pages, everyone (and anyone) can be an expert. Anyone can tell you the "REAL Truth" about the aliens' presence on Earth and their nefarious dealings with the government and how Obama is an alien and why I've been chosen as their emissary and why alien hybrids have pale skin and why aliens will arrive in 2012 and where the underwater alien bases are in the Gulf of Mexico and why the hundreds of orbs in my photograph are mental images of aliens and not dust particles and why some UFO craft disguise themselves as airplanes and why chemtrails are not just contrails and why this blog is passing through into another dimension....

Some of the comments posted are interesting and/or amusing, in particular the typical, and virtually incomprehensible, response from the ubiquitous Alfred Lehmberg. But the article sums up as well as anything else I've read just why ufology now really is history - there is just no new information coming along.

THE HAUNTING OF VIETNAM

 Mai La Gustafsson. War and Shadows: The Haunting of Vietnam. Cornell University Press, 2009

This is a book about being haunted by off-campus history, the history which is felt in the blood and bones, and imbibed at the elders feet. The ghosts that haunt Vietnam are not the pale spectres from the sanitised heritage industry reflecting a story book past, nor do they haunt places, so much as people. The ghosts here are of the innumerable dead of the long Vietnam war, the succession of wars which went on from 1945 to 1975.

Within the Vietnamese culture presented by Gustafsson, there are two contrasting fates for the dead. One is to be incorporated into the heaven at the heart of the habitat of hearth and home, after a peaceful death in old age surrounded by kith and kin, and after death they are to be treated with the appropriate rituals, and housed (in spirit) in the household shrine as honoured ancestors (the to-tien ), ritually propitiated by the next generation. The other is die alone, far from home, in the hell of outer wilderness, unmourned, unrespected and unpropriated. These dead will wander as 'angry ghosts' (con-ma). These angry ghosts possess the living as if, denied the habitat of hearth, home and shrine, they seek a surrogate in human bodies.

Based on her field work in 1996, Americo-Vietnamese anthropologist Gustafsson, portrays a country almost overrun with the angry ghosts of the war dead, who haunt and taunt the living. The signs of possession include altered states of consciousness, trances, violent or disruptive behaviour, torrents of abusive speech, hallucinations, fugue states, abnormal feats, self-harm, etc. It is again tempting to see these of manifestations of the wilderness which the angry ghosts bring into the heart of the habitat. They represent forces of chaos, disorder and disruption.

As the statistics she presents show, in a sense the war turned the whole country into one hellish wilderness, a place of chaos and disorder, now encoded into a history which challenges all attempts to rebuild order. The angry dead represent the unredeemed forces of history, which manifest themselves through a collective post-traumatic stress disorder and survivor guilt (to say nothing of whatever physical ailments the chemical warfare of the agent orange type brought in its wake).

This trauma was not helped by the authorities banning traditional ways of dealing with the dead, and exorcising spirits, and now seems to be exacerbated by the three-way tension between the traditional beliefs of the 'triple religion', the values of the Communist regime, and the rise of westernised consumerist culture.

The attempts by the Vietnamese people to 'get on with it', to build the sort of rational world of daylight reason and common sense that both the Communist authorities and the new consumerist elite aspire to, are constantly frustrated by the angry ghosts of off-campus history which refuse to lie down.

This is not just a Vietnamese problem of course, though the angry ghosts of other societies do not often manifest in this quasi-medical fashion. They prefer the subtler road of newspaper headlines and political clichés. In that sense much of the press in Britain is haunted. The bad times are coming, and the angry ghosts of the world will be stirring anew, few of them, unlike those of Vietnam will be exorcised by a visit to a local underground medium. -- Peter Rogerson.

CRASH, BANG, WALLOP!

Kevin D. Randle, Crash: When UFOs Fall From the Sky, New Page Books, NJ, 2010 -- Reviewed by John Harney

The more interesting UFO crash stories in this book will be familiar to most UFO enthusiasts. It is not the stories themselves, but Randle's treatment of them, which is of interest to the keen ufologist. Indeed, one would need to be keen to read through this book and and compare Randle's findings with those of other writers and investigators. Most of the crash stories described are obviously misinterpretations of natural phenomena, such as bolides, or fairly obvious hoaxes. Many of them were first published by ufologists not noted for their reliability or honesty.

One of the cases that is particularly interesting, especially in view of the fact that the sceptics have remarkably little to say about it, is the Shag Harbour incident of 4 October 1967. That evening, a number of witnesses reported seeing a large object with four flashing lights on it descending towards the harbour. It seemed to land on the water and then apparently sank. It was eventually announced that underwater searches had failed to find anything. This incident was brought to the attention of the Condon Committee, and Randle mildly criticises them for failing to go there and conduct a thorough investigation. He fails to point out, though, that the Committee's resources were limited and they would obviously find it easier to investigate reports in the USA than in other countries.

The incident did not apparently arouse much interest among ufologists, and it was not until 1993 that Chris Styles decided to investigate it, and was joined in this work in 1995 by Don Ledger. Interest in this case has no doubt been maintained to some extent by the reluctance of the authorities to release documents concerning official investigations of the incident. Like so many other cases, the long delay before ufologists began serious investigations must inevitably have caused the loss or distortion of some of the evidence and testimony.

There is a lengthy section on the Kecksburg "crash" of 9 December 1965, with an interesting account of the confusion caused by some people thinking that an object had crashed into nearby woodland. Randle is confused by the conflicting testimony and concludes: "It seems reasonable to accept the military and official answer that the sighting was the result of a bolide, but, to do that, too much eyewitness testimony has to be discarded."

In his discussion of the Roswell incident of July 1947, Randle rejects the Project Mogul explanation and writes: "Something strange fell and it has yet to be identified. There is a very good chance that it was extraterrestrial."

Incidentally, it appears that Randle's former colleague, Don Schmitt, whom he repudiated publicly some years ago for making false claims about his occupation and academic qualifications, and his alleged incompetence as a UFO investigator, has now been quietly rehabilitated. Not only is he mentioned in the text, but there are even two pictures of him, including one of him giving a lecture about Roswell.

Randle's desire to believe that at least a few of the incidents he describes are really ET craft is obvious. I also suspect that he allows only a few to be possibly genuine because he realises that it would be impossible to conceal proof of their reality if there were too many. In this way he can preserve the fantasy of the great secret which will one day be disclosed. It's a bit sad, isn't it?