ALVIN LAWSON (1929 - 2010)

I was saddened to learn of the recent death of Alvin Lawson, at the age of 80. He was best known in ufological circles for his promotion of the 'Birth Trauma' hypothesis for UFO abductions. He was a professor of English at California State University, Long Beach. 
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SPECTRES OF THE SELF

Shane McCorristine. Spectres of the Self: Thinking About Ghosts and Ghost-Seeing in England, 1750-1920. Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Spectres of the Self traces the development of ideas surrounding hallucination from the 18th and 19th century rationalist critique of secular paranormal experience (such authors such as Manchester physician John Ferriar always being careful to explain that they were not trespassing in any way into the realm of religion and theology), to the challenge mounted by the Society for Psychical Research.
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FORWARD TO THE PAST

Leslie Kean. UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record. Harmony Books, 2010.

The reader who turns to this book looking for dramatic revelations about crashed flying saucers in the Pentagon pantry and the like is going to be disappointed, for it is largely a rhetorically sober account of a number of UFO cases, most of which will be well known to the UFO community. However, that is clearly not the 'community' to which this book is addressed. 
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MAGONIA INTERNATIONAL

Some people might have noticed the little panel down the side of this page showing the flags of all those countries whose more enlightened citizens have visited the Magonia Blog since February 2010. Just a bit of fun, as they say. But I'm delighted to notice that we've now notched up our one hundredth country.

Congratulations to the British Virgin Islands!

UFOs: WHAT THE HELL'S GOING ON?

Nick Redfern. Final Events and the Secret Government Group on Demonic UFOs and the Afterlife. Anomalist Books, 2010.

Nick Redfern meets the whistle blowers yet again. This time they are from the self styled 'Collins Elite' who, since the 1940s, have been combating the nasty old demons behind the UFOs unleashed by the magical workings of Jack Parsons, the rocket scientist and disciple of Aleister Crowley.
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ET TALK

Fernando J. Ballesteros. ET Talk: How Will We Communicate with Intelligent Life on Other Worlds? Springer, 2010.

After looking at the prospects for life in the solar system, and examining the various strategies used to search for extraterrestrial signals, and their success or lack of same (a number of isolated anomalies such as the famous 'Wow' signal but no actual sustained signal) Ballesteros goes into the meat of the book, how to communicate.
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THE ORIGINAL FLYING SAUCER?

I normally put information about new and forthcoming books over in the Book News listing, but there is one recent item to which I would like give a somewhat wider promotion. My thanks to Mark Pilkington and his Mirage Men blog for alerting me to this. 
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THE CIRCLE LINE

Merlin Coverley. Psychogeography. Pocket Essentials, 2010.

Louis Armstrong is reputed to have said to a questioner "If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know!" After reading this book, that's how I feel about psychogeography. Anything which combines Surrealism, Rambeau, Baudelaire, Robinson Crusoe, Will Self, Situationism and a collection of 1940s and 1950s French political theorists is going to be difficult to define.
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ANALYTICAL AND SCIENTIFIC?

The Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) is the largest open-membership UFO organisation in the USA, and probably the world. According to the 'mission statement' printed in every issue of its monthly Journal "MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO phenomenon for the benefit of humanity".

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