UFO DOWN?

Andy Roberts. UFO Down: the Berwyn Mountain UFO Crash. Fortean Words, 2010.-- Reviewed by John Rimmer

This slim volume must be just about the perfect example of how mysteries can be explained by careful study of documentation and careful interviewing of people who were in a position to know what happened, even years after the events themselves..

The Berwyn case has been talked about as 'Britain's Roswell', and this phrase in itself gives a clue to a lot of the mythology that has surrounded it over the last 36 years.

On 23 January 1974 two unusual things coincided over and under a moderately remote mountainside in North Wales: a very bright meteor and an earthquake. Not surprisingly this caused a great deal of confusion and brought a number of agencies into play, including local police, mountain rescue, and the RAF. The first, not unreasonable, assumption was that a plane had crashed. This area of North Wales is close to locations that are often used for low altitude pilot training.

Roberts has examined the records of all these groups in detail, and has spoken to many of the people involved. Of course the lapse of time will have allowed memories to mutate to some extent, but not enough to introduce a significant distortion, and the contemporary records allow him to produce an almost minute-by-minute account of exactly what happened that night.

This revealed another coincidence: at about the same time as the earthquake and meteor there were a group of poachers out on the mountainside with bright light. So we've got booms, crashes, quakes, and bright lights all in the one place at the same time. Too much of a coincidence, surely?

Well no, because at first that's exactly how it was reported and accepted. Local and national papers ran with stories of earthquakes and meteors, and reported how astronomers and geologists visited the area to investigate. And the paper-trail that records these visits is clearly explained in this book. In doing this the author has produced just about the perfect 'after the fact' UFO investigation, a clear example of how mysteries can be explained by careful study of documentation and careful interviewing of people who are in a position to know what happened.

But perhaps the more important part of this book is the examination of what happened in the thirty years after, the development of the 'legend of the Berwyn Mountain crash.'

Many British ufologists have felt themselves to be under the shadow of American ufology, it seemed that all the really big cases happened in America: Arnold, Roswell, Socorro, The Hills. Of course, there was Rendlesham, but that was sort of American anyway, with all the direct participants being US military. There was no real 'British Roswell'. But all the time Berwyn was waiting there to be discovered.

Although there is a brief mention of a possible UFO link in Flying Saucer Review Case Histories in 1974, the story first entered the Fortean milieu through the semi-mysterious APEN 'UFO investigation' organisation (or pseudo-organisation, as it was almost certainly the work of just one person) which sent out some letters to ufologists making bizarre claims about the incident, quoting an alleged anonymous witness who said he saw an Adamski-style 'scout ship' on the mountain. After this, interest faded until the events entered into discussion of 'earthlights' were they were used a possible example of the phenomenon in Paul Devereux's book of that title published in 1980.

The case came back into the world of ufology with the publication of Jenny Randles' UFO Reality, where it got linked with Rendlesham and other UFO crash claims; and further promoted in the same author's UFO Retrievals. At this point Berwyn became an integral part of the UFO mythology, with mystery witnesses, local rumours and even APEN letters resurfacing.

Soon other figures entered to muddy the waters. Margaret Fry, a London ufologist who had moved to North Wales spoke to some local people, but as her interviews were not recorded, either on tape or even in a notebook, even more distortions were introduced into the story. It fitted well into the 'X-Files' enthusiasm of the times.

By now the story was growing rapidly. There were stories of bodies recovered from crashed saucers being take to the Government's biological research unit at Porton Down, rumours of an accidentally dropped nuclear warhead (because of a perceived 'silence' Jenny Randles felt at the mention of Berwyn to a group of RAF officers!), and of course the usual claims of government secrecy and Men in Black. (Andy discovered that there actually were Men in Black: investigators from the British Geological Survey interviewing witnesses in the small villages around Berwyn stood out incongruously in their dark business suits!)

This book is a text-book example of how to use publicly available records to produce a forensic account of a supposed UFO case, and an intriguing account of how the UFO rumour mill, fuelled by unfounded speculation and poor first-hand investigation, operates to produce a classic mystery. And it is also a first-class example of an investigator being honest enough to admit that there is still one part of the mystery he has not be able to solve.

A key book for all ufologists and Forteans.

HIDDEN REALMS

Jerome Clark. Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds. Visible Ink, 2010 -- Reviewed by John Rimmer

In compiling his various encyclopedias Jerome Clark must have read more UFO and UFO-related books and magazines, and other general weirdness, than anyone on Earth, with the possible exception of Hilary Evans. This latest book is further evidence of that achievement.

Clark has scoured obscure books, forgotten magazines, hidden newspaper reports, to produce an encyclopedic survey of fringe beliefs about the place of mankind in the universe, and his alleged interactions with other beings and civilizations.

The book is divided into three sections. The first, 'Earth's Secret Places' looks at those hidden races and civilizations that are supposed to share the planet with us. This topic has taken on a bizarre new lease of life recently, with the proposition being put forward by one or two ufologists that an undiscovered advanced technological race is the source of 'structured craft' UFOs. A persistent theme in these stories links them to the legend of Atlantis. When Atlantis was destroyed, their proponents claims, surviving remnant escaped to various hidden parts of the globe to re-form their civilization.

One location which recurs in these stories is Mt Shasta in the US North West. Shasta rose to fame in the writings of Fredrick Spencer Oliver, in his book A Dweller on Two Planets. This was written in 1886 and first published privately by Oliver's mother in 1905. It tells how a gold prospector finds a secret civilization hidden in the depths of the mountain, who reveal to him his previous life in Atlantis.

The legend of Mt Shasta seems to have guided American occultist thought for decades, involving characters such as the founder of the AMORC Rosicrucians and originator of the 'Lemuria' legend Lewis Spence, and Guy Ballard, founder of the I AM sect. The Shasta legend later developed into a complex of claims and beliefs involving hidden cities, lost races and underground saucer bases. It was obviously a considerable influence on the 'Shaver Mystery' and more recent claims of hidden technological civilizations, which Clark develops further in chapters on Shaver and the 'holes in the poles' claims. Many of these stories appeared in Ray Palmer's Fate magazine, which is looked at in some detail.

The second division of the book examines claims of life on, and contact with, all the planets of the solar system. Some of this, such as Adamski's claims, will be well know to most readers, but claims made for the other seven planets by writers claiming physical or psychic voyages will be less familiar. What is perhaps most surprising about this section is just how widespread belief in extraterrestrial life was amongst the 'respectable' scientific community, and how early such ideas developed -- and how late they persisted.

It is clear that there is a distinction between what one might consider scientific speculation, and the wilder claims of contactees, spiritualists and psychics who have claimed to be in communication with inhabitants of the solar system, but in some cases perhaps not quite a wide a gap as either side might wish!

It is when we get to the third section of the book, 'Between Our World and the Next' that I detect an agenda beginning to creep in to Clark's analysis. The four chapters here deal with what Clark describes as "experience anomalies" - those creatures and worlds that exist not in the pages of books or songs and legends, but are actually seen and described by living people. In the past Jerome Clark has criticised some of the writers associated with Magonia of indulging in 'literary criticism' -- looking at the structure and narrative of UFO reports, rather than dealing with them as actual experiences. I, and other Magonian writers, have rejected this criticism, and agree with writers such as David Hufford that many of these stories are reports of actually experienced events - although this does not, in itself, mean that they cannot also be discussed in terms of structure and narrative.

The four categories of 'experience anomalies' that Clark discusses are: elves and fairies, spectral armies, flying serpents and mystery airships.

I will leave aside the chapter on flying serpents, as this is a phenomenon completely new to me, and I do not feel informed enough to comment. The author has summarised the contents of the chapter as an article in a recent edition of Fortean Times.

The chapter on elves and fairyland raised rather more questions. Clark gives a good summary of the accounts of encounters with the world of 'faery' in historical times and amongst indigenous populations. He also finds some remarkable contemporary or near-contemporary stories. I was amused to see that one report came from a town called Canby, but this Canby was in Oregon, and not the one in Minnesota that many of us are fascinated by. It's worth quoting this at length:

"... an April 1950 report from Canby Oregon, where a woman named Ellen Jonerson, working on her lawn, happened to glance over to her neighbor's [sic] yard. There, to her considerable surprise, she spotted a tiny male figure, perhaps a foot tall, with his back to her. The figure was of stocky build, clothed in overalls and a plain shirt, with a skullcap on his head. Moments later, when he turned around, Jonerson saw that his face was heavily tanned. She dashed inside to call a friend, then ran out to see the figure walking away with a waddling motion toward a parked car. He vanished underneath it. This story is sometimes cited in the UFO literature"

The last, almost throwaway, sentence is important as it seems to confirm that Clark sees some sort of distinction between entities encountered within the context of the UFO phenomena and the more traditional 'faery' creatures. Further on in this chapter he criticises Jacques Vallée's contention that "the modern global belief in flying saucers and their occupants is identical to an earlier belief in the fairy-faith"

Clark claims: "It is true that on infrequent occasions fairy-encounter claims do call close encounters of the third kind - at least in a very broad sense - to mind." Here one must take issue with the word 'infrequent', because as it has been shown time after time (not least in the pages of Magonia) that there is a close and very frequent overlap between UFO encounters and other 'experience anomalies', and very little, other than date and location, that distinguishes them.

The distinction between 'actually experience' and 'literary criticism' becomes even more problematical in the next chapter, which discusses the phenomenon of 'phantom armies'. Reports of aerial clashes between spectral armies are surprisingly common in chronicles and early histories, as well as in the pamphlets and 'Books of Wonders' which were published in considerable numbers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

These accounts must be read in their historical and cultural context, which is often difficult for modern commentators. Most of the English 'spectral armies' are reported from the time of the Civil War and are usually coded political commentary. This would be understood by contemporary readers, but is often misinterpreted as an objective record by later writers. An example is the fall of strange hailstones during the English Civil War, noted by Paul Devereux and John Harney, and discussed as part of the Earth Light debate: http://magonia.haaan.com/2010/the-earth-lights-controversy-john-harney-responds/.

It is probably significant that many of the later, nineteenth-century tales that Clark recounts here come from a similar period of deadly fratricide, the American Civil War. Although these accounts sometimes seem to involve two or more witnesses, in nearly all cases the descriptions are given on the word of one person, or even anonymously through newspaper accounts which are impossible to verify. It is clear that some of them are seen in a visionary and quasi-religious context which suggests that they are intended for a particular audience, who will understand the imagery rather more easily than we can at this remove.

I find Clark's statement "That people believed they had seen these things is beyond dispute" impossible to accept. He seems to base this claim solely on the fact that 'phantom army' stories "continued well past the Middle Ages and into at least the nineteenth century", otherwise, he asserts "there would be little reason not to view them with suspicion". I think here he is falling into the fallacy that the more the witnesses are 'people like us', the more value we should give to their accounts, and of course nineteenth century Americans are much more 'like us' than twelfth-century ecclesiastical chroniclers or seventeenth century revolutionaries.

The final chapter deals with mystery airship reports, largely from the 1897 American wave. He has done some excellent research into a series of airship sightings and landings in Texas with careful examination of local papers and town records to track down the alleged witnesses and confirm their reality and reliability. This chapter is a model of historical research, but it is here that Clark's agenda becomes most overt.

One witness of an airship in the town of Beaumont, Texas, was the Rabbi Levy. He certainly seems to be the sort of witness any UFO investigator would give their eye-teeth for: well-known and respected in his community, his good character and his work in religious and charitable fields well documented. The New York Times reports "The New Orleans Picayune has been interviewing Rabbi A. Levy of Beaumont, Texas, and quotes his as declaring, with all the solemnity a ministerial position and unimpeachable character will give, that he has himself seen the sky boat close at hand and has conversed with its passengers". Clark adds, "Levy would have been a mature 49 years old at the time.

Now, is this account in any way different from the dozens - hundreds - of accounts we have had from 'reliable witnesses', 'trained observers', 'pillars of the community' and all the other fine, upstanding folk who have told us of their observations, close encounters and contacts with flying saucers and their denizens? I can't see that it is, and so conclude that the airship wave was a mass phenomenon, mediated through newspapers, rumour and gossip, and driven by 'virtual experiences' and 'radical misperceptions'. The only other interpretation of stories such as that of Rabbi Levy, is that one or more actual undocumented airships were travelling around the USA at the time. (A theory which, having read this chapter, I might be a bit less willing to dismiss than previously - but only a bit!)

And, of course all this applies to UFOs as well. But Clark will not accept this, despite the evidence he himself has uncovered. For Clark, the airships are an internal experience, real enough to the percipient, but having no external, 'objectively existing' reality, whereas UFOs are 'structured craft'. Indeed, in the very last sentence of this book, Clark makes the distinction clear, in a remarkable sentence: "it is likely, in other words that if mystery airships are not poorly described UFOs, they are something almost infinitely stranger".

Consider for a moment that phrase "poorly described UFOs". This can only mean that Clark believes there is something called 'a UFO' - not a meteorological phenomenon, not a radical misperception, not a mirage or an astronomical object, not a piece of space debris, not a hallucination or an 'experience anomaly' - not even an extraterrestrial craft! It's just a 'UFO'.

Despite my doubts about the subtext in parts of this book, it is a fascinating compilation. Dense with information, but easily readable, everybody will find something new and intriguing in its pages, and there are enough references and bibliographical details to assist further research on any specific topic. It is an essential component of every Fortean's book collection.

SCIENCE AND SPIRITUALITY

Bernard Haisch. The Purpose-Guided Universe: Believing in Einstein, Darwin, and God. New Page Books. 2010 -- Reviewed by John Harney

Although it is written for the general reader, this book is not an easy read. At first glance, it seems to be an attempt to reconcile science and religion, but the author soon makes it clear that most organised religion is part of the problem and that "... the reconciliation of science and spirituality is a different matter. That is not only possible, it is essential".

Bernard Haisch is an astrophysicist and he uses his scientific knowledge to argue that, as the laws and constants of nature are such as to make the evolution of living creatures possible, then these were determined for that purpose. With different values, life would be impossible.

It could, of course, be a statistical matter. Many scientists suppose that there exist a vast, or infinite, number of universes, and a very small proportion of them have conditions suitable for for life, as ours is, or we would not be here to argue about it.

Haisch favours the idea that the laws of our universe are not accidental, but determined by God. He uses the theory of quantum mechanics to construct his argument. I think it is important here for the reader to distinguish between scientific theories and their interpretation, by keeping in mind the distinctions between science and the philosophy of science. In quantum theory nothing is fixed until it is measured. It can thus be argued that nothing can exist without awareness. This makes consciousness fundamental, like gravity, unlike Newtonian mechanics where everything proceeds by the operation of a basically simple process of cause and effect, leaving consciousness as something entirely incidental and unnecessary, so that everything in the world would be just the same if there were no conscious entities in it.

Newtonian science, in which every event is caused by previous events, also leaves no room for free will, a problem which has led to endless arguments among philosophers and theologians.

Haisch supports the view that the notion that the universe and life in it are purely accidental is untrue, but he does not argue for creationism or intelligent design, as both of these suggest that God micromanages the world. He agrees with those who suppose that God merely created the conditions which made the universe and life as we know it possible and that God works in the world through his creatures. All conscious beings are thus thought to be, in a sense, at one with God, although very few are are aware of this.

This idea is associated with the Indian spiritual tradition called Vedanta, where what we call God is Brahman and our spiritual self is Atman. The mystic achieves enlightenment by coming to realise that Brahman and Atman are one. This mystical experience can neither be imagined nor described. Such experiences are not confined to Indian tradition, of course, but are found in most religions, the attempts to describe them being influenced by tradition, culture or doctrine. The author discusses the differences between these and the apparently similar but superficial experiences obtained by taking psychedelic drugs.

Haisch's attempts to reconcile spirituality with scientific discoveries and theories will not convince all readers but will provide them with plenty to think and argue about.

DARK FAIRIES

Bob Curran. Dark Fairies, (illustrated by Ian Daniels). Career Press/New Page Books, 2010.

Most people in the contemporary western world have a highly romanticised view of fairies, derived in no small part from Disney schmaltz. Fairyland/Magonia is seen as, to use the famous expression of Jacques Vallee, "a place where gentle folks and graceful fairies dance, and lament the coarse world below." However. as we in Magonia have often argued, and this new book by Ulster folklorist and story teller Dr Bob Curran emphasises, the original fairy beliefs were very different.

The 'fairies' of the traditional folklore were at best ambivalent, at worst downright malevolent creatures or forces. Curran takes on a tour of these: the fairies of the mounds, those of the air, those under the ground, and the takers of children. Though there may be little consensus on what these 'fairies' were, which had many different names in many different lands, there is one on what they were not. They are not the pretty little things with gossamer wings that die when a child says they don't believe in them. Rather they represent the liminal realm between the human world and the world of wild nature, between wildness and culture, between matter and spirit. As liminal creatures they are perceived as belong both to the humanand non-human realm. Their humanity can often be seen as misshapen, the broken image of society's outcasts. The changeling represents those whose humanity is seen somehow in question, the mentally, physically or emotionally challenged, already part way other.

As liminal beings these petty supernaturals can be seen as both representative of some older human or quasi-human group, though outside of Indonesia there is little archaeology to back up such a notion; and as demoted gods, symbols of the forces of wild nature, the djinn made out of smokeless fire (which probably derive from lightning flashes and other electrical phenomena associated with desert sandstorms), the brollaghans which symbolise fog and mist, the sluagh, the host of the winter storm.

Reading through this book reminds us that this folklore is not really dead, it is just transmuted into different forms. The fairies who take children have become the stranger abductors of modern legend, those who take adults are the alien abductors of modern UFO lore, which has incorporated almost all the traditions of the old fairy lore, though I have yet to find a story in which greys or their derivatives prophecy the death of a human by wailing outside their window.

Prefigurations of both of these traditions can be found in a story told in late 19th century Sligo. A little boy and girl were playing out in the early evening, it was getting cold and they were just about to go in when a fine coach and horses came towards them at terrific speed. Inside were a grand lady and gentleman; the latter called out to the children saying he had something marvellous for them to see. In answer to the children's questions, they said they were gentry of a sort from beyond the hills,. The woman brought out a wonderful golden ball, saying that there were many wonders like that in their halls, and would they like to come and see them. The little girl went with them and was never seen again, the boy was given the ball, which when he looked had turned into a turnip.

The similarity to modern fears is obvious, and behind it lies some notion of the glamour of the wilderness, the sense that the wild things beyond the human habitat can lore us away into their wilderness to become part of them. Wild nature as the ultimate child abuser.

We can see from some other stories what the fairies might represent. Tired of perhaps too grand a wife Bridget, Michael Cleary uses her illness as excuse to literally dehumanise her as a changeling and burn her to death. The wilderness did possess that household but it was the abuser not the victim surely who was taken over by the inner feral.

To be true to these traditions noted in Curran's book, a modern fairy story would have to replace the old barrows and other traditional sites falling into the wild, with some modern equivalent, perhaps a decaying empty housing estate, with the Dark Fairies of the 21st century being grotesque and broken drug addicts. -- Reviewed by Peter Rogerson.

ALIEN CONVERSATIONS

Chris Impey (ed.) Talking About Life: Conversations on Astrobiology, Cambridge University Press, 2010.

This book comprises interviews with 37 people associated with various aspects of the search for extraterrestrial life and intelligence, dealing with topics ranging from the search for life on Mars, the chemistry of various solar system bodies, the development of life and mind on earth, the search for extrasolar planets, and the nature of extraterrestrial intelligence.

The views expressed here range from the cautious to the radical, and from those rooted in hard science to the more fanciful, and the views on extraterrestrial life range from those who see it as being widespread, to those who suspect it is extremely rare, perhaps unique to earth. Many contain interesting biographical backgrounds, which demonstrate the passions that motivate scientists, very different from the cold hearted, rational, science nerd of popular imagination.

This of course reflects the fact that exobiology is a subject for which there are no agreed facts or evidence, no one knows one way or the other, and much of the work on the subject is pure speculation. There is no agreement on how much the development of life on earth was the product of contingency, the accidents of history, and how much it was constrained.

There is absolutely no comfort in this book for believers in extraterrestrial UFOs, or extraterrestrial humanoids. Though some of the writers argue that intelligence will arise naturally, they are using the word in the most general sense of the word, one that embraces elephants, chimpanzees, dolphins, parrots and octopi, and not anthropomorphic intelligence. This shows that there is no real agreement as to what the word intelligent in 'intelligent life' actually means.

Nor actually what is meant by life. I suspect that we are as unlikely to agree what the word 'technology' might mean in a non-terrestrial context. I very much suspect that if alien life, mind and technology exist they are unlikely to resemble anything we have any experience of at all.

POWER OF UNREASON

In a posting over on the ufologyinuk discussion group UFO researcher/archivist Isaac Koi points out that ufologists are often quite unaware of the academic literature on conspiracy theories, even though they form such an important part of the ufological narrative.

He notes that the leftist think-tank Demos has recently published 'The Power of Unreason', a 55-page report on conspiracy theories. Koi comments: "I found its content to be rather simplistic in various respects and based on some assumptions that are not actually justified by the sociological data regarding conspiracy theories, but it has quite a few interesting references at the end to other academic discussions."

The report is on the Demos website, where a copy can be downloaded for free:
http://www.demos.co.uk/publications/thepowerofunreason

Although largely looking at conspiracy theories in terms of political extremism and terrorism, it has relevance in the wider context in which UFO-related conspiracy theories develop. Of course these themselves merge, through ideas of 'government cover-up' into the broader spectrum of political conspiracy.

One group they reference, which I had not previously come across are the Nuwaubians: "classified by Southern Poverty Law Centre as a Black supremacist hate group. The leader’s literature includes conspiracy theories, ‘ufology’, the extra-terrestrial origins of the humanity, extra-terrestrials control Hollywood, Illuminati, anti-group conspiracies."

They note the way in which overtly political conspiracy theories have been incorporated into what they call "other forms of 'counter-knowledge' such as ufology, the occult and David Icke's shape-shifting lizards", referencing Michael Barkun's Culture of Conspiracy, Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America, which has been reviewed on the Magonia Blog HERE.

Acknowledging its limitations this is still an interesting report, well worth reading and many thanks to Isaac Koi for bringing it to our attention.