NORTHERN ECHOES - FIFTY YEARS ON

---

---

Here we are, more than fifty years after the great British UFO flap of November 1967, half a century from the stories of Socorro, the Warminster Thing and the great Stoke-on-Trent flap. Such stirring times seem much closer than half a century ago, half way from Passchendaele to today.

🔻

NORTHERN ECHOES: 50 YEARS ON

---

---

This summer marks the 50th anniversary of my major involvement in ufology, for it was then that I bought in one of the Manchester bookshops, now long gone, a copy of the magazine format Flying Saucer Menace written by Brad Steiger in the days before he found the New Age. It was 64 pages of sensationalist text, photos of UFO luminaries and lots of photos of UFOs, of varying degrees of dubiousness.
🔻

NORTHERN ECHOES: QUART IN A PINT POT

With autumn coming around it was time for another visit from Clas and Carl-Anton from AFU in Sweden to pick up another tranche of books and magazines, probably the last big hoist from my original collections. However I am constantly getting more stuff in for review in Magonia, and eventual transfer to AFU.
🔻

NORTHERN ECHOES: IN A FLAP

December 2015 marks a very special double anniversary, 50 years since John Harney wrote his first editorial for the then Merseyside UFO Group Newsletter, shortly to become the MUFORG Bulletin, the prehistoric ancestor of Magonia, and 40 years since the first issue of the new series of MUFOB under the editorship of John Rimmer. I am sure that readers of this blog will join me in congratulating the two Johns for their sterling work over such a period of time.
🔽

NORTHERN ECHOES: RESCUE ARCHAEOLOGY

On Wednesday 16th September our friends from AFU, Clas Svahn and his colleagues Karl-Anton Mattsson and Hakon Ekstrand came to pick up the third and largest tranche of my Fortean  collection; something in the region of 3,400 books at a quick guestimate. They had clearly had a harassing journey up to Manchester, having suffered from an overnight stomach bug. Then a minor traffic accident led to problems with the hire car firm.
🔻

NORTHERN ECHOES: MEETING THE SHAMANS

Ernest(o) de Martino. Magic: Primitive and Modern. Tom Stacy, 1972.

This was a book which had quite an influence on me as a 21 year old student, introducing me to shamanism and to radical ideas of what one might later see as a proto-post modernist nature. Ernesto de Martino (1908-1965) was an Italian anthropologist and philosopher who undertook an intellectual journey from fascism to communism, perhaps seeing both as forms of civic religion.
🔻

NORTHERN ECHOES: DOWNSIZING

On Monday 22nd September I had the pleasure of meeting Clas Svahn (right, below), his son Niklas (left) and colleague Carl-Anton Mattsson from the Archives for the Unexplained in Norrkoping, Sweden. They came to collect the second tranche of my vast Fortean library and Clas estimates there were about 3,500 volumes in all, which they fitted into about 150 boxes. 

🔽

NORTHERN ECHOES: I READ IT IN THE PAPERS

Northern Echoes is, for the benefit of those who can’t quite work out such things, a random collection of notes and jottings on whatever comes to mind, with little or no connection between them. We start with an early British newspaper version of some classic Fortean stories, and their origin:
🔻

NORTHERN ECHOES: THE CHESTER MYSTERY

In his round up of 25 years ago, John Rimmer referred to my article 'Off Limits'. In that I made comment on the case of Tawana Brawley and its similarities to that of Elizabeth Canning. Tawana was a fifteen year old black girl who disappeared for a few days in November 1987 and reappears in a small town in New York.

🔻🔻🔻

NORTHERN ECHOES: MORE WEIRD WARRINGTON

First there are some updates on the Spring Heel Jack in Warrington story. First I have now deposited the original clippings with the local history library in Warrington Library, 1 Museum Street, Warrington, WA1 1JB. (See website for details of contacts and opening hours). Secondly, about a year before the SHJ story this ghost story was featured on page 7 of the Warrington Examiner for 17 July 1926.

🔻

ON TALKING TO SQUIRRELS

We have again been taken to task for not taking the ETH seriously.  I have commented on this in Magonia over the years, and here is another go. The trouble with the supporters of the ETH and SETI is that they really don’t have any clear idea what they mean by “advanced extraterrestrial intelligence” and often have quite self-contradictory ideas about the presumed ETs.
🔻

BLACK BLACK OPS, UFOS AND IFOS

The reaction from the American 'UFO community' to Mark Pilkington and John Lundberg’s projected Mirage Men film is the predictable unthinking rejection. Far too many American ufologists are sadly every bit as closed minded as Phil Klass, it is just that they have a different set of prejudices. Indeed ufology for some is clearly a religion, in which classic cases are sacred texts not to be questioned, and the ETH (or some esoteric variant thereof) is an article of  faith.
🔻

SHJ, IFOS, AND THE FEMINISATION OF UFOLOGY

With books on Spring Heeled Jack by Karl Bell and Mike Dash in the offing - see HERE - the following account of his visits to Manchester and district should be of interest. The description bears some considerable similarity to the illustration below, taken from a typical 'penny dreadful' of the period. The story demonstrates that over a hundred years ago people were already projecting images from the mass media into ambiguous stimuli.
🔻🔻🔻

ABDUCTIONS, 'SERIOUS RESEARCH' AND A SAD LOSS

My short, and I thought rather bland, review of Whitley Strieber’s latest book seems to have provoked a surprising amount of comment. Looking at the debate, it rather reminded me of the sorts of arguments about George Adamski and his fellow contactees that used to fill the pages of UFO periodicals back in the 1950s and ‘60s. Opinion tended to polarise between those who took their stories as gospel, and those who saw them as nothing more than cynical money grabbing frauds.

🔻

HILARY EVANS, MIKE DASH AND THE THREE MINUTE MILE

I can't let Northern Echoes go by without seconding John Rimmer's thoughts on Hilary Evans, such a sad loss. I can't say that I knew him personally, we met on perhaps three or four occasions (a visit with John to the MEPL back in 1979, a couple of conferences in the 1980s and I think one of the UnConventions) but I can testify to his willingness to help, sending me free of charge a photocopy of a rare booklet in his possession when I was doing my revisionist history of abductions back in the early 1990s.
🔻

NORTHERN ECHOES: MY FIFTY YEARS IN A STRANGE WORLD

---

---

It is hard for me to believe it, but this Spring and Summer marks 50 years of my interest in topics ufological, Fortean, Gouldian and paranormal. This interest was sparked by a television series called Court of Mystery which ran every other week from the 18th May to 13th July 1961. This featured a number of 'unsolved mysteries' including the Eilean Mor lighthouse, the Mary Celeste, Andrew Crosse the man who made insects, the loss of the Waratah, and finally 'The Flying Saucer'.
🔻

BUDD HOPKINS AND THE MYSTERIOUS SYMBOLS

---

---

The clip by Carol Rainey on Budd Hopkins alleged secret UFO symbols raises a number of interesting points. One is the reaction of the American UFO Updates message board which was not only to ban Ms Rainey from its board, but also to ban any further comment on the issue of the alien scripts, though that did not seem to apply to Hopkins associate and abductee John Velez. As we in Magonia do not believe in censorship I will indeed discuss the clip on the alien script.

🔻

ABDUCTIONS AND HYBRIDS: STILL A DANGEROUS GAME

Carol Rainey's article below gives insights into more than the activities of Hopkins and Jacobs, for it sheds light on how people become converts to new (to them) religious movements, and the mentality of closed communities which see themselves under siege. We all know of people who have converted to the religion of a new partner, particularly where that religion is a major part of said partner's life.
🔽

NORTHERN ECHOES: RAPS, TAPS AND REBRANDING UFOLOGY

Having now joined the two Johns [Harney and Rimmer] in the great ranks of the retired, I hope to have more time to devote to Northern Echoes, and perhaps even an article or two. My review of Robert McLuhan's Randi's Prize has brought a response from the author on his website, which sadly descended to the now usual SPR-type argument from snobbery, i.e. that it is quite impossible for 'those sort of people', (in this case problem children) to fool their betters. People who think like that are setting themselves up for a fall.

🔻

NORTHERN ECHOES: THE APPRENTICE, INTCAT AND WITCHCRAFT

Its now just about 40 years since I first joined the MUFOB mob as the apprentice. Time certainly flies. Apprentices to MUFOB were rather luckier than those on the TV programme of that name, no selling tat on Bury market under the orders of a time-warped tycoon. The job at first consisted of writing letters to the editor insulting various members of BUFORA, particularly those with fake degrees issued from a former Methodist chapel in North London.
🔻