ALICE IN UFOLAND

D.W. Pasulka, Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences, St Martin’s Essentials, 2023.

Pasulka, who is a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, regards the belief in UFOs as a ‘nascent religiosity’ and that the perception of the subject is mediated and manipulated by the media and unnamed agents of disinformation.

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CURSES ANCIENT AND MODERN

Thomas Waters. Cursed Britain, A History of Witchcraft and Black Magic in Modern Times. Yale University Press, 2019.

One thing that people find difficult to understand is randomness – blind chance. It is unsettling to imagine that at any moment, for no apparent reason  your entire life might chance drastically for the worse. A sudden illness, a serious accident, a random act of violence, losing a job, or a financial downturn could change your life irrevocably. And if two, three or more such blows happened at the same time it might be difficult to attribute it all to chance.
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THE GREAT ESCAPE

Serinity Young. Women Who Fly: Goddesses, Witches, Mystics, and Other Airborne Females. Oxford University Press, 2018.

This is in many ways a joy of a book – certainly an unusual joy for an academic feminist book. Without ever resorting to the tedious or impenetrable jargon (oh mercy!) so beloved of far too many grant-seeking scholars, it delivers a hard-hitting historical analysis in plain, but glowing, English. 
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TAKEN TO EXTREMES

Peter Biskind. The Sky is Falling; How Vampires, Zombies, Androids and Superheroes Made America Great for Extremism. Allen Lane, 2018.

Nearly all of us have enjoyed our guilty pleasures of watching films and TV shows that depict the fantastic and suspend belief to an extent that was not as normal a few decades ago. It is not just supernatural beings that are increasingly depicted, such as vampires, zombies and witches with powers so outré as to be superhumans themselves.

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ART, NOT ELECTRONICS

Wladimir Velminski, Homo Sovieticus: Brain Waves, Mind Control, and Telepathic Destiny, The MIT Press, 2017.

The apparent incongruity of this book’s title, which seems more at home in Nexus magazine, and its publisher raises questions and expectations. Is it really a serious academic study of research not just into mind control but psychic mind control?
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THE GHOST IN THE PROJECTOR

Murray Leeder. The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

In the cinema of the 1890’s the image of the spectre, the ghost, and the skeleton are regular occurrences. The new trick photography of film was ideally suited to playfully examine our fear of mortality and urge to communicate with the living dead. 

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UNSEEN, UNKNOWN, UNKNOWABLE

Susan Lepselter. The Resonance of Unseen Things; Politics, Power, Captivity and UFOs in the American Uncanny. University of Michigan Press, 2016.

Back in the day, when UFO UpDates ruled the UFO world, with rapier-sharp cut and thrust between the giants of ufology, one criticism which was levelled at Magonia – mainly by Jerome Clark – was that we indulged in ‘literary criticism’ rather than serious, scientific, UFO research.
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THE NAZI OCCULT - FACTS AND MYTHS

Monica Black and Eric Kurlander (editors). Revisiting the ‘Nazi Occult’: Histories, Realities, Legacies. Camden House, NY. 2015.

There have been dozens of books examining the purported links between occultism and the rise of Nazism in Germany, ranging from the scholarly to the most abjectly crass and sensationalist. 
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SCIENCE AND SCIENTISM

John Cowburn. Scientism: A Word We Need. Mosaic Press, Preston, Victoria, Australia. 2013

Scientism is the belief that only scientific knowledge is valid. Thus, it is thought that everything that is true can, at least in principle, be proved by scientific means. John Cowburn argues that scientism has become too prevalent among scientists and is applied to fields of study where it is not logically applicable.
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WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD…

J.H. Brennan, Whisperers: The Secret History of the Spirit World, Duckworth Overlook. 2013.

Brennan is a well-known elder statesman of the more New Agey end of popular occultism. He comes over as a nice guy and writes in an engaging, accessible style, which is always a plus in these rushed days when a book must seize the imagination within seconds or never be read at all.

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PROPHECY FAILS

Timothy Jenkins. Of Flying Saucers and Social Scientists: A Re-reading of 'When Prophecy Fails'. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

This book is a re-examination of When Prophecy Fails, setting in the background of theosophical and Adventist religion. The study concerns a group set up in Chicago in 1954 by ‘Marion Keech’ (Dorothy Martin, 1900-1992), who relayed messages from Sananda, a space brother who later revealed he was the then current identity of Jesus Christ. 

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THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY

Carl Watkins. The Undiscovered Country: Journeys Among the Dead. Bodley Head, 2013.

Carl Watkins takes us on a truly haunting journey, through the realms of the dead as envisaged by the people of England over the last 650 years, from the fifteenth century to the end of the First World War. In the beginning was the traditional Christian world-view of Last Judgment, the Resurrection of the Dead, still envisaged in the middle of the nineteenth century in John Martin’s The Great Day of His Wrath.
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QUITE EXTRAORDINARY

Peter Lamont. Extraordinary Beliefs: A Historical Approach to a Psychological Problem. Cambridge University Press, 2013.

In this interesting book Peter Lamont, historian, psychologist, sceptical psychical researcher and one time professional magician examines the rhetoric used by both promoters and critiques of paranormal phenomena over the last two hundred years. He traces these developments across mesmerism, spiritualism, psychical research and 'scientific' parapsychology.

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THINKING ABOUT THOUGHT-READING

Barry H. Wiley. The Thought Reader Craze: Victorian Science at the Enchanted Boundary. McFarland, 2012.

If Roger Clarke’s book reviewed below covered a broad sweep, this account covers a narrower field in more depth. Wiley’s study covers roughly the period from about 1870 to 1914, the latter part of the “social” 19th century (1815-1914). This was the age in which science came of age and began to professionalise, a period of astounding discoveries and inventions, the period in which a recognisably modern world came into being. 

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MUTANTS AND MYSTICS

Jeffrey J. Kripal, Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal, University of Chigaco Press, 2011.

Mutants and Mystics is a fascinating and stimulating book, and an important one. It's one of the most authentically Fortean works I've read a long time, as well as being perfectly in tune with the spirit of  Magonia, since its addresses head-on the relationship between culture and the paranormal (defined in its widest sense to include everything from psi to UFOs and alien encounters).

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SUPERNATURAL AMERICA

Lawrence R. Samuel. Supernatural America: A Cultural History. Praeger, 2011.

In this lively book. Samuel, the founder of a “consultancy to Fortune 500 companies”. traces how the paranormal has been reflected in the pages of the press and other media since the beginning of the twentieth century. We can see from this how media which once reported the work of respected workers in the field such as J. B. Rhine have gone considerably downmarket in recent years. 

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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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FRENCH PSYCHICS AND METAPSYCHICS

Sofie Lachapelle. Investigating the Supernatural: from Spirtism and Occultism to Psychical Research and Metapsychics in France 1853-1931. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011.

Sofie Lachapelle here reviews the successive waves of interest in matters psychical in France, from what were essentially religious outlooks to the at least quasi-scientific. Unlike the rather free and easy development of spiritualism on Britain, French spiritism was organised on highly authoritarian lines by its founder, a maths teacher Denizard H. L. Revail, who adopted the name Allan Kardec because it sounded Celtic.
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WILD TALENTS

Pamela Rae Heath. Mind-Matter Interaction: Review of Historical Reports, Theory and Research. McFarland, 2011.

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David Gordon White. Sinister Yogis. University of Chicago Press, 2011

Many cultures have traditions of religious or occult virtuosi who possess extraordinary wild talents. These are to at least some degree the subjects of these two books. 
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SURVEYING PARANORMAL AMERICA

Christopher D. Bader, F. Carson Mencken and Joseph O. Baker. Paranormal America: Ghost Encounters, UFO Sightings, Bigfoot Hunts and Other Curiosities in Religion and Culture. New York University Press, 2010.

Its not quite apparent from the title, but this is a study based around some of the questions asked in two surveys of religious attitudes and beliefs, conducted for the Baylor University Religion Survey Project by the Gallup organisation in 2005 and 2007: (http://www.isreligion.org/programs-research/surveys-of-religion/)

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