CONNECTIONS AND LOOSE ENDS

J. Douglas Kenyon. (ed) Lost Powers - Reclaiming our Inner Connection. Atlantis Rising, 2016.

Most of us have been duped at one time or another. Whether it is a belief that we once cherished, only to become disillusioned as we grew in wisdom and experience, or the amazement of sleight-of-hand magic, there are many ways to be deceived. Some are useful and amusingly impressive, others may be embarrassing, painful or seriously damaging.
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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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MULTIDIMENSIONAL MUSINGS

Jack Hunter (editor). Strange Dimensions: A Paranthopology Anthology. Psychoid Books, 2015.

This anthology includes sixteen articles from the journal Paranthropology: Journal of Anthropological Approaches to the Paranormal over the period 2013-2014. We tend to associate anthropology with remote ‘exotic’ societies of the sort that feature in the National Geographic and TV shows.
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WALKING BESIDE YOU

John Geiger. The Third Man Factor: Surviving the Impossible. Cannongate, 2010.

Normally we try to review books as they come along, but occasionally we overlook some. This is one such which is well worth noting. The title of the book comes from T S Elliot’s The Waste Land:

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EXPLORING THE PARANORMAL

Christopher C. French and Anna Stone. Anomalistic Psychology: Exploring Paranormal Belief and Experience. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Christopher French defines anomalistic psychology as “attempts to explain paranormal and related beliefs and ostensibly paranormal experiences in terms of known (or knowable) psychological and physical factors . . . without assuming there is anything paranormal involved” [p1].

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FAIRYLAND, MY FAIRYLAND

Marjorie T. Johnson. Seeing Fairies: From the Lost Archives of the Fairy Investigation Society, Authentic Reports of Fairies in Modern Times. Anomalist Books, 2014.

If this book is any guide, there are a lot of people out there who claim to have seen fairies. Its 350+ pages are crammed full of first-hand sighting reports, most of them not duplicating the many accounts recorded in my own book Fairies: Real Encounters With Little People.
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"WHAT ARE THE CHANCES...?"

David Hand. The Improbability Principle: Why Incredibly Unlikely Things Keep Happening. Bantam Press, 2014.

The other week something rather spooky happened. I was re-reading William Poundstone’s Big Secrets, a book published in the US in 1983 and the UK in 1985. One of the secrets discussed was how mentalists like (the then famous) Kreskin did their tricks. On page 206 there is this little excerpt:
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A GOOD GUIDE TO STRANGE STUFF

Roy Bainton. The Mammoth Book of Unexplained Phenomena. Constable and Robinson, 2013.

This is yet another of those monster books from Constable and Robinson that try to cover as much as possible, with the inevitable result that some parts are better than others. For me the best part of this book was the one dealing with sea mysteries, because it is clear that this is a topic that Bainton, a former merchant seaman with multiple family connections to the fishing industry, knows and cares about.

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VIRTUAL BANALITY

I’ve recently been scanning back issues of Magonia for reference use, and have been reminded of a topic which we reported on back in the 1990s, but which seems to have slipped out of sight over the intervening years. I think it’s worth revisiting, as it is a potentially important clue to the origin of many of the phenomena we discuss in Magonia and the books we review.
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STRANGE! INCREDIBLE! PUZZLING!

Jerome Clark. Unexplained! Strange Sightings, Incredible Experiences and Puzzling Physical Phenomena. Visible Ink, 2013 (Third edition)

This is the third and much updated edition of Jerry Clark’s round-up of a variety of Fortean topics. This time he has ditched such well covered topics as UFOs and the Pacific Bigfoot to concentrate on a variety of lesser known anomalies. 

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REAL WOLFMEN

Linda S. Godfrey. Real Wolfmen: True Encounters in Modern America. Tarcher, 2012.

What constitutes a real, 100% totally serious fortean phenomenon? Well, UFOs are one such: thousands of first hand accounts of sightings, close encounters, even photographs and physical evidence. Lots of books about them as well, very serious, even boring in some cases, written by scientists - real scientists, even nuclear physicists! - so UFOs must be pretty serious. 
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HIDDEN REALMS

Jerome Clark. Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds. Visible Ink, 2010.

In compiling his various encyclopaedias Jerome Clark must have read more UFO and UFO-related books and magazines, and other general weirdness, than anyone on Earth, with the possible exception of Hilary Evans. This latest book is further evidence of that achievement.

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SLIDE RULES

Hilary Evans. Sliders: The Enigma of Streetlight Interference. Anomalist Books, 2010.

This interesting but ultimately frustrating book presents the results of Hilary Evans's years of investigation into 'streetlight interference'; the experience of streetlights going off (or sometimes on) when walking near them. He presents the experiences and comments of 215 correspondents, the upshot of which tends to be that there is no one consistent pattern to SLI.
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STALKING THE TRICKSTERS

Christopher O'Brien. Stalking the Tricksters: Shapeshifters, Skinwalkers, Dark Adepts and 2012. Adventures Unlimited, 2009.

Just before reading this book, I was out walking in one of the tiny patches of wilderness left in my suburb, thinking of the story of the urban fox attacking two children as reported HERE. I was wondering about using it as a Northern Echoes piece, noting that this was a classic example of how the wilderness is, literally in this case, biting back, and it reminds us that nothing is really truly known, nothing is really tame and nowhere is really safe.
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BEEN THERE, DONE THAT

Marie D Jones and Larry Flaxman. The Deja-Vu Enigma: A Journey Through the Anomalies of Mind, Memory and Time. New Page Books, 2010.

If you start reading this review and suddenly think that you have read it all before, then you are having an experience of deja-vu. If you start reading this review and suddenly think that you have read it all before, then you are having an experience of deja-vu. 

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AUTHORS OF THE IMPOSSIBLE

Jeffrey Kripal. Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred. The University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Jeffrey Kripal is a professor of philosophy and religious thought at Rice University in Houston Texas, and the author of a book, among others, on the Esalen Institute. Here he is concerned with 'the impossible', the varieties of anomalous personal experience which challenge not just contemporary science's view of the universe, but the whole world of daylight reason and commonsense.

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ANOMALOUS EXPERIENCES

Matthew D. Smith. (editor) Anomalous Experiences: Essays from Parapsychological and Psychological Perspectives. McFarland and Company, 2009.

These papers, classed into two sections, parapsychological approaches and psychological approaches, are based on those presented to a one-day conference at Liverpool Hope University in June 2005. There are several papers which should be of interest to Magonia readers.
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