RIGHT THEN, WRONG NOW

Kevin D. Randle. The Government UFO Files: The Conspiracy of Cover Up. Visible Ink, 2014.

This book is a look at the official US government investigations into UFO reports from the days of the foo fighters onwards. The trouble with this is that these investigations largely finished with the closure of Project Blue Book in 1969. The result is that what this book offers is more essentially time warp ufology, rehashing familiar cases from 40, 50 or 60 years ago based on those US government files.
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AT HOME WITH GHOSTS

Caron Lipman. Co-habiting With Ghosts: Knowledge, Experience, Belief and the Domestic Uncanny. Ashgate, 2014.

During my working career as a local history librarian I found that second only to tracing family history, finding out “who lived in my house” was the most common form of enquiry that I had to deal with. A sizable tranche of those enquiries were really about “who is haunting my house”.

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NEITHER SCEPTICAL NOR SCIENTIFIC

Timothy Pennington. Science, Skeptics and UFOs: A Reluctant Scientist Explores the World of UFOs. Dog Ear Publishing, 2013

Timothy Pennington portrays himself as a 'reluctant scientist', and like many such people proudly parades his PhD on the cover of his, I imagine, largely self-published book. His degree is in chemistry and his main career was of an industrial chemist, which is not perhaps the most relevant.
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ALL OUR YESTERDAYS

Over the last couple of months I have been reorganising the Magonia and MUFOB on-line archives, and hopefully putting them into a more accessible format, using the Blogspot templates that are used for this and other Magonia sites. I have also taken the opportunity to add a number of articles, editorials and columns that were not in the original archive. In the near future I shall also be re-posting some of the extra features that have been posted from time to time. The new format makes it possible to bring up all archived articles from any particular issue of Magonia and MUFOB, as well as all articles by a particular writer.

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ACCIDENTALLY HUMAN

Henry Gee. The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution. University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Popular media usually portray evolution, particularly human evolution as a sort of ladder of continuous sequence, starting with amoeba and ending with someone like Carl Sagan. Human being want to believe that they are the chosen species, the aim of evolution and that everything and everyone else are just steps on the way or rungs on the ladder. Gee calls this world view “human exceptionalism”

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NDE: INSIGHT OR ILLUSION

Birk Engmann. Near-Death Experiences: Heavenly Insight or Human Illusion? Springer, 2014.

In this short book, Birk Engmann, a neurologist at the University of Leipzig, critically examines the sorts of claims that are often made about NDEs. He argues that many of the beliefs that have grown around them have been influenced by the pervasive Christian traditions of the western world, and of the continuing influence of aspects of Gnosticism on these traditions. He critically analyses the view that imagery from earlier times can be taken as fairly literal representations of actual experiences.
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THE DEVIL'S TABERNACLE

Anthony Ossa-Richardson, The Devil’s Tabernacle: The Pagan Oracles in Early Modern Thought, Princeton University Press, 2013

To call The Devil’s Tabernacle a work of specialist scholarship is something of an understatement. It’s a highly specialised study of a highly specialised subject, a revision of the doctoral dissertation that earned Anthony Ossa-Richardson a Leverhulme Fellowship at the University of London, in which he displays an exhaustive familiarity with obscure historical treatises and engages in often rarefied debate with his peers.
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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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25 YEARS AGO: MAGONIA 31 AND 32

Two back issues to look at this time: must try harder to keep to schedule! The crop circle have now settled into a niche between conceptual art and cosmic mysticism, but back in 1988 some people, including Magonia contributor Paul Fuller, still thought that there was a chance of establishing its bona-fides as a genuine physical scientific phenomenon. 🔻

VAMPIRES: SAGAS AND SOUND BITES

Margot Adler, Vampires Are Us: Understanding Our Love Affair with the Immortal Dark Side. Weiser, 2014

There’s no question that vampires are big. In fact, they are – or at least have been over the past few years – something of a publishing phenomenon, especially among young adults. There’s even a fashion crossover with the Gothy look, plus the interesting psychological syndrome, usually associated with one’s teenage years, whereby the wearer of striking outfits and make-up is simultaneously screaming ‘look at me/how dare you look at me!’. Vampires, in short, are cool.
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