ALCHEMY: WORDS AND MEANINGS

Jordan Stratford. A Dictionary of Western Alchemy. Quest Books, 2011.

This is a useful book up to a point. It brings together a range of chemical symbols and offers a summary of the most important processes of laboratory alchemy and throws in a brief biography of a couple of dozen alchemists of note.
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ANCIENT ALIENS?

Philip Coppens. The Ancient Alien Question. New Page Books, 2011.

Oh my, what a busy book this is! From the minute you pick it up, it vies for your attention in a number of ways. The cover’s bold font is squeezed around a photograph of what looks to be a Central or South American pyramid plus four small, circular inlays of what are presumably meant to be ‘mysterious’ objects.
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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE PARANORMAL

Tony Jinks. An Introduction to the Psychology of Paranormal Belief and Experience. McFarland, 2011

In this intriguing book, Tony Jinks, a lecturer on neuroscience at the University of Western Sydney, uses a wide definition of the paranormal, encompassing all the various topics covered by Magonia, and takes a detailed examination of the range of psychological explanations, both mainstream and exotic used to "explain" such experiences.
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TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO: MAGONIA 24, NOVEMBER 1986

The appearance of Magonia 24 heralded a radical change in design and production of the magazine, being the first to be produced on a computer, the now legendary Amstrad PCW8512, with printout on a very noisy dot-matrix printer using a typewriter ribbon. It also marked our final A5 size issue, prior to the last of our numerous changes of format.
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ALL OUR YESTERDAYS

John Hanson and Dawn Holloway. Haunted Skies, The Encyclopaedia of British UFOs: Volume 3, 1966-1967. CFZ Press, 2011.

Yet another great nostalgia fest for ageing ufologists, now covering the period in which the prehistoric ancestor of Magonia, the Merseyside UFO Group Bulletin operated. I note, in fact, that there are a number of references to MUFORG Bulletin and our archive website.
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GHOSTLY CREEPY HAUNTINGS!

        

Jeff Belanger. The World's Most Haunted Places. New Page, 2011.

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Bob Curran. The World's Creepiest Places. New Page, 2011.

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Jim Harold. Jim Harold's Campfire True Ghost Stories. New Page, 2011

I'm not too sure what the exact difference is between 'most haunted' and 'creepiest', even after reading the first two volumes reviewed here, as they cover the same sorts of places and stories in the same way. Although both 'Creepy' and 'Haunted' describe hauntings in classical locations like old castles, spooky churchyards and crumbling mansions, many of the most interesting accounts relate to more contemporary and less traditional locales.
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MIB ENCOUNTERS

I have just put a new page up on this site, as you will probably have noticed by the tab which has just appeared above. Clicking on this tab will take you to a listing, compiled by Gareth J. Medway, of accounts of experiences of Men in Black, and MIB-type entities. This is based on available published literature and does not pretend to be a complete listing, although it does contain all the well-know cases and many more obscure ones. Although most of these accounts come from UFO-related experiences, this is by no means always the case.

UNCON 2011

It's been a couple of years since I went to a Fortean Times UnConvention, and this one was a slightly different format to what I've been accustomed. Although the line-up of speakers was excellent, the location rather limited the programme. 🔻

FISHY STORIES

Anthony Milne. Fireballs, Skyquakes and Hums: Probing the Mysteries of Light and Sound. Robert Hale, 2011.

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Lars Thomas. Weird Waters: The Lake and Sea Monsters of Scandinavia and the Baltic Sea. CFZ, 2011

It is probable that the relatively small number of UFO reports that are not simply generated by misperceptions of well-established phenomena will include among their number a range of uncatalogued atmospheric and other natural phenomena. 
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DENYING SCIENCE

John Grant. Denying Science: Conspiracy Theories, Media Distortions and the War Against Reality. Prometheus, 2011

One of the blurbs on this book describes John Grant as "the living heir of Martin Gardener", this is, I think, less than fair to Grant. Martin Gardner often took on soft targets and subjected them to ridicule, Grant takes on the big boys.
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FOREWARNED

Colm Keane. Forewarned: Extraordinary Irish Stories of Premonitions and Dreams. Capel Island, 2011

This is a collection of mainly first hand accounts of premonitions, dreams, omens and etc. Given than such stories are self reported and after the event they possess little evidential value for psychical researchers and unlikely to convince the sceptic, Rather, accounts like these are best seen as collections of folk narratives and it as such that there interest lies.
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