THAT WAS THE YEAR THAT WAS

It's customary at the end of the year for magazines and newspapers to publish endless lists of 'the best of...', 'personality of the year', the top ten of ...', etc., etc. I see no reason why Magonia shouldn't jump on this bandwagon, so I thought I'd do a list of the ten most-read posts that we've published in 2014. As you might expect, those which have been on-line the longest tend to have had the most hits, but it's by no means the rule, and some of the most read pieces have been posted in the latter half of the year.

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GETTING MY GOAT

J. Nathan Couch. Goatman: Flesh or Folklore? Createspace, 2014.

A constant theme of Fortean/Magonian analysis is how to draw boundaries between phenomena which are physically real, actually experienced, genuinely believed, rumoured, or imaginary. Indeed whether there is really any way we can define these various levels of experience. 

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LETTING IN THE LIGHT

P.T. Mistlberger. The Inner Light: Self-Realization via the Western Esoteric Tradition, Axis Mundi Books, 2014.

My immediate reaction on being handed The Inner Light to review was that this was a book that could go in one of two very different directions. The title and subtitle, together with the packaging and the cover blurb’s description of the author as a ‘transpersonal therapist’ and ‘transformation workshop facilitator,’ awakened all my prejudices against the New Age.
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FIRST READ: THE CASE OF MORRIS JESSUP

M. K. Jessup. The Case for the UFO: Unidentified Flying Objects. Arco, 1955.

M. K. Jessup. The Expanding Case for the UFO. Arco, 1957.

Morris Ketchum Jessup was perhaps the first person to use the term ‘UFO’ in a commercial publication, which is something of an irony as very little of these books was devoted to stories of unidentified flying objects, rather they were devoted to a great variety of Fortean topics, such as Fortean falls, unusual archaeological ruins, mystery meteors, disappearing ships and crews and the like.

GOD'S PLANET

Owen Gingerich. God's Planet. Harvard University Press, 2014

This book, consisting of three lectures delivered to the American Scientific Affiliation, "a fellowship of Christians in the sciences founded in 1941", is devoted to discussing the tensions between science and religion.
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