THE NOT-SO-SECRET SOCIETY

René le Forestier, The Bavarian Illuminati: The Rise and Fall of the World’s Most Secret Society, Inner Traditions, 2022.

French historian René le Forestier’s monumental and solidly scholarly Les Illuminés de Bavière et la franc-maçonnerie allemande has been the go-to work on the original Order of the Illuminati since it came out in 1914. 

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CRICKETS AND CONSPIRACIES

Robert W. Baloh and Robert E. Bartholomew. Havana Syndrome - Mass Psychogenic Illness and the Real Story Behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria. Springer, 2020.

American diplomatic staff and American tourists in Havana, Cuba suffered from a spate of sonic attacks starting in late 2016. The situation was so bad that it helped derail a 2-year initiative to restore amicable relations between the two countries and led to the expulsion of several Cuban diplomats based in Washington. 

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UFOLOGY MEETS KREMLINOLOGY

Nick Redfern, Flying Saucers from the Kremlin. Lisa Hagen Books 2019.

With a title like this, you could be forgiven for thinking this was a book about UFO sightings from Russia and the former Soviet Union, following Ion Hobana's and Julien Weberbergh's 1972 UFO's from behind the Iron Curtain. But the book isn't about that. Subtitled 'UFOs, Russian Meddling, Soviet Spies and Cold War Secrets', the book is an attempt to show that the Russians have been manipulating the UFO phenomenon and its witnesses since the days of the Contactees right up to the present.

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COWBOYS AND ALIENS

Dermot Butler and Carl Nally. Circle of Deceit: A Terrifying Alien Agenda in Ireland and Beyond. Flying Disk Press, 2018.

David Cayton, director of the ‘Animal Pathology Field Unit’ provides the foreword where he describes investigating the mutilation of a pony called Rascal. From the start his efforts were thwarted by the Sussex police who feared that if they released any details it would inspire copycat attacks.
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HOLD ON TO YOUR TINFOIL HAT!

Timothy Green Beckley and Sean Casteel. UFO Hostilities and the Evil Alien Agenda; Lethal Encounters with Ultra-terrestrials Exposed. Global Communication/Inner Light. 2018.

One of the first UFO books I ever bought was a cheap paperback Flying Saucers Are Hostile by Brad Steiger and Joan Whritenour, which promised ‘UFO Atrocities from strange disappearances to bizarre deaths.’ At the time it was as startling as the cover blurb promised.

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KEEPING CONSPIRACIES UNDER CONTROL

Nick Redfern. Control: MKUltra, Chemtrails, and the Conspiracy to Suppress the Masses. Visible Ink Press, 2018.

If you are worried about the state of the world and the way it is going, reading Nick Redfern's controversial new book will not provide much relief, if any, although it is very readable, well-written and thoroughly researched. It provides plenty of food for thought about hidden influences behind recent world-changing events, and what they may be leading to. 

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UNDER SUSPICION

Rob Brotherton.  Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories. Bloomsbury Sigma, 2015.

Belief in conspiracy theories is often portrayed as affecting only those people on the fringes of society, but this is incorrect argues psychologist Rob Brotherton. Rather, conspiracy theories are a natural product of how the brain makes patterns out of incoming data. We all have tendencies to link disparate things together and see patterns where there are none.
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NEW AGE, SAME OLD STORIES

David G Robertson. UFOs, Conspiracy Theories and the New Age: Millennial Conspiracism. Bloomsbury Academic, 2016 (Bloomsbury Advances in Religious Studies)

Why have the dreams of a new and glorious future, a new age of peace and plenty as imagined by the hippies 50 years ago failed to materialise? For a surprising number of people the answer is that They have prevented it happening and They are not just the generations of unimaginative second rate politicians or over greedy business folk, They are the forces of cosmic evil, the secret Cabal that controls the world.
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TWO UFO CRASHES

Larry Holcombe. The Presidents and UFOs: A Secret History from FDR to Obama. Foreword by Stanton Friedman. St Martin’s Press, 2015

Can UFOs Advance Science? A New Look at the Evidence. SUNRISE Information Services, 2015.

Among the vast plethora of UFO books that I read in the 1970s was one called UFOs, Past, Present and Future by Robert Emeneger (Ballantine Books, 1974), based on a TV documentary. What distinguished this otherwise reasonable run-of-the-mill book was a fictional presentation of a future alien landing. Years later UFO-lore started to claim that this story was an actual event; a real life UFO landing at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico in 1964.

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CONSPIRACY QUARTET

Emma A. Jane and Chris Fleming. Modern Conspiracy: The Importance of Being Paranoid. Bloomsbury, 2014.

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Andrew May. Conspiracy: A History of the World for Conspiracy Theorists. Bretwalda Books, 2014.

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Andy Thomas. Conspiracies: The Facts, The Theories, The Evidence. Watkins Books, 2013.

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Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent. American Conspiracy Theories Oxford University Press, 2014.

In a dangerous and uncertain world it is perhaps not surprising that conspiracy theories develop and grow. These four books present various facets of the theories and their study.
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MISSING, PRESUMED SHREDDED

Nick Redfern. For Nobody’s Eyes Only. New Page Books, 2014.

Things go missing every day, from car keys and wallets right up to Boeing 777 airliners. It should be of little surprise, then, that official dossiers and files are among the items that hands cannot be laid upon when such things are required. Modern bureaucracies number staff in their tens of thousands, so it is with scant surprise that the public hears of information being lost and mislaid.
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KRAZY KONSPIRACY KORNER!

Alan Power, The Princess Diana Conspiracy: The Evidence for Murder. Probity Press Ltd, 2013.

The assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas fifty years ago was to spark a vast range of conspiracy theories, which were to fan out into much wider territory. Our friend the late Roger Sandell was a student of these for many years, and next year I will be transferring, all going well, his vast collection of books and other material on the subject, that I inherited and added to, on to Archives for the Unexplained in Sweden.

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CONSPIRACY UPDATE

Michael Barkun. A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America. University of California Press. Second edition, 2013.

The first edition of this book, reviewed HERE, was just about completed when 9/11 occurred, and only a small amount of material on the conspiracy theories surrounding that event could be included. This new edition adds a second chapter to 9/11 conspiracy theorising, centring around the films Loose Change and Zeitgeist and the work of writers such as David Ray Griffin.
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STATE OF DENIAL

Carl Nally and Dermot Butler. States of Denial: The Tuskar Rock Incident and Other Mysteries. Mercier Press, Cork, 2013.

‘Conspiracy theories, by their nature, cannot be conclusively disproven,’ says the skeptic Ben Radford, ‘since any evidence contradicting them can be dismissed or ignored as part of the conspiracy itself.’ Radford was writing in June this year after the seventeenth anniversary of the crash of TWA Flight 800 near New York, in which 230 people died.
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MADDER THAN MAD

Will Storr. The Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science. Picador, 2013.

The first thing that strikes me about this book is that Will Storr and Picador must have some pretty expensive lawyers; the second is that I would have loved to have seen the unexpurgated version. The reason for this is that Storr takes on a whole range of scientific and other heretics, and some of their critics.
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PYRAMID SELLING

Nick Redfern. The Pyramids and the Pentagon, New Page Books, 2012.

Many people are fascinated by strange beliefs and stories about ancient artifacts, or sensational interpretations of ancient writings. This book deals with a number of these, together with some more modern mysteries and controversies, particularly with regard to official interest, real or imagined, by US government agencies.
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SOLDIERS' TALES

Some intereresting comments on Roswell and conspiracy theories in general from the maverick political website 'Spiked'. The writer's comments on a new book, Cryptos Conundrum by Chase Brandon seem to suggest it is another of that classic genre described by Jerome Clark in a Magonia article from 1983 as "Soldiers’ Tales, or, the Horrendous Secrets I Learned in the Service". He describes his encounter with one such storyteller, and I take the liberty of quoting his article at length:
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CRYPTOSCATOLOGY

Robert Guffey. Cryptoscatology: Conspiracy Theory as an Art Form. TrineDay, 2012.

The subtitle of this book is intriguing, as is the blurb which suggests that Guffey is going to examine conspiracy theories from a cultural studies perspective. However this is not really what this book is at all, actually it is not really a book at all, rather it is a collection of previously published essays with all the usual drawbacks of such a form, such as repetition, and in parts being very out of date by the time this compilation was published.
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A DANGEROUS GAME?

Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval. The Master Game: Unmasking the Secret Rulers of the World. The Disinformation Company, 2011.

Ever since Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval emerged as the stars of the pre-Millennium ‘alternative history’ boom – which they largely created through seminal books such as The Sign and the Seal and The Orion Mystery – their work has had a subtext. Although the main thrust of their solo and joint books is the challenging of conventional ideas about the origins of civilisation and championing the case for an advanced global culture in the ancient past, they set this against a more eschatological, indeed apocalyptic, background.
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SECRETS AND LIES

Mark A. Lause. A Secret Society History of the Civil War. University of Illinois Press, 2011

The influence of Freemasonry on American Independence is fairly well-known (e.g. from Baigent and Leigh, The Temple and the Lodge, which formed the basis for Dan Brown’s latest novel), but not much has been published, at least in Britain, about the involvement of secret societies in the American Civil War.
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