Category: aliens

The Big Grey Man of Ben MacDhui – Affleck Gray

The Big Grey Man of Ben MacDhui – Affleck Gray

Impulse Books – 1970

In 1891, a hiker had a creepy experience while climbing Ben MacDhui, one of the highest mountains in Scotland. He was pottering alone when he heard footsteps approaching him from behind. When he turned around, there was nobody there. He didn’t tell many people until 1925. After this, other climbers who noticed strange happenings while climbing Ben MacDhui came forward. In this book, Affleck Gray, a Scottish mountaineer and historian, collects every single iota of public discussion of the mysterious mountain and the Ferla Mor.

Ferla Mor comes from Fear Liath Mor, Scottish for Big Grey Man (technically “man grey big”). This is the name given to the phenomenon. Apparently people have seen a giant grey man walking around up there. It seems pretty likely that these sightings could have been the Brocken spectre, a spectral phenomenon that makes an observer’s shadow look like a giant. I’ve come across mentions of the Brocken Spectre before when reading books about bigfoot or the yeti, and it definitely could account for visions of a big grey man in the mountains.

It’s not just big shadowy men that people have encountered up this mountain though. Several people have heard creepy music and sinister footsteps. Members of the Aetherius society claimed that the mountain was used as an alien base, and some nutty spiritualists claimed that the Fear Liath Mor was actually a Buddhist master. Is this lad supposed to be a Sasquatch, a ghost, an alien or a what? Another witness claims to have seen a fox walking upright, wearing a top-hat… Yeah. When I said that Affleck Gray collected every iota of discussion of the weird stuff up this mountain, I was serious. I admire the comprehensive nature of this work, but it’s this exact feature of the book that makes it unbelievable. This is a collection of folklore more than anything else. The author never really tries to convince the reader that anything specific is going on, and this is the book’s saving grace.

Some of the chapters feel like filler. There is a big discussion on the possibility of life on other planets that has very little bearing on the rest of the book, and there’s an unreadable chapter on ley-lines. Things get a bit repetitive towards the end of the book too, but it’s fairly short, so it’s not unbearable.

There’s been a few editions of this book. I believe the first one came out in 1970. There is also an ebook available from Birlinn Press.

I’m not convinced that anything particularly weird has happened on this particular mountain. A surprising amount of the book is taken up with discussions on stuff that happened on other mountains. Mountains are weird places though. I think that a mountainside is the perfect place for a person to get a bit freaked out when they’re on their own, and I only wish that I had the opportunity to do so myself. I live fairly close to some mountains, but they’re full of bears and wolves and I’d get eaten within minutes. Ben Macdhui looks like it’s fairly close to Loch Ness and Aleister Crowley’s old house, so I’ll try and get over there once I’ve made my fortune.

Kelleher and Knapp’s Hunt for the Skinwalker

Hunt for the Skinwalker: Science Confronts the Unexplained at a Remote Ranch in Utah
Colm A. Kelleher Ph.D., and George Knapp
Paraview Pocket Books – 2005


In the mid 1990s, a family claimed that they had witnessed a bunch of weird stuff (UFOs, sasquatches, poltergeist activity, werewolves…) on their ranch. They convinced a right-wing millionaire to buy their ranch so that he could study the phenomena. He spent millions of dollars hiring a bunch of scientists to study the ranch. After several years of observation, the scientists had absolutely zero proof of anything remotely weird happening there.

This book is an attempt to justify all of the time and money that were wasted on this project.

I started off enjoying this. It begins with a giant, bullet-proof wolf prowling around the ranch and soon suggests that the weird stuff that is happening may be being caused by the souls of a bunch of Buffalo-soldier freemasons whose graves had been disturbed by a tribe of Native Americans. I’ve read so much fiction recently that it was very easy for me to suspend disbelief and enjoy the narrative here for its weirdness.

Unfortunately, the Hunt for the Skinwalker soon devolves into the same anti-science rhetoric that I’ve encountered so many times in books about this kind of nonsense. Modern science is too close-minded to reveal anything meaningful about the paranormal. My hole. Honestly, this book was so dumb that I feel absolutely zero desire to try to counter its claims. It’s too stupid to take seriously.

The authors had so little to go on that much of the book is actually taken up with chapters about other places where spooky events have occurred. At one point this book references the work of Tom Dongo. I had a good laugh seeing him listed as a source. The authors here also include testimony from people who remotely-viewed the ranch and sensed a bad presence.

Also, only a small part of the book discusses skinwalkers. Skinwalkers are a kind of evil Native American witchdoctor that can shapeshift. The book concludes that skinwalkers are likely to blame because the authors don’t have any better explanation.

This book is garbage. If you have a copy and haven’t read it, don’t waste your time. Tear it up and use it to make a poo sandwich instead.

Basil Tyson’s UFOs Satanic Terror

Mysterious humanoids are roaming our earth, and a diabolical plan of deception, delusion, and destruction has already commenced.

UFOs Satanic Terror – Basil Tyson

Horizon – 1977

I ordered a copy of this book immediately after discovering its existence. I knew that there was no way it could live up to its title, but I needed to have a copy of it on my bookshelf regardless.

The basic idea here is that aliens are actually just servants of the Devil who have been sent to Earth to lead people away from Christianity. The book doesn’t really give any sensible explanation of this theory though. It’s more of a “we don’t understand this, so it must be the Devil” deal.

The one remarkable thing about this book is the way it highlights the narrowness of the author’s worldview. I don’t believe in extraterrestials visiting Earth, but Basil Tyson’s arguments against this narrative are more ridiculous than the narrative itself. He uses passages from the Old Testament to explain events that were supposedly happening the the 20th century. Basil Tyson really comes across as a frightened, confused fool.

After spending much of the book discussing how occultism is dangerous, Tyson claims to be a psychic himself. This is part of the reason he knows so much about the UFO phenomenon. He claims that several demons have appeared to him over the course of his life, one was disguised as his mom. He talked to these demons, and he was even brave enough to laugh at one who was not particularly scary. A tough lad was our Basil.

Basil Tyson was a crazy man, and this is a crazy book. Unfortunately, it’s actually quite a boring read. If you’re into this kind of thing, Bob Larson’s UFOs and the Alien Agenda is a more entertaining piece of garbage on the exact same topic.

I.R.Aliens: Dermot Butler and Carl Nally’s Circle of Deceit

Circle of Deceit: A Terrifying Alien Agenda in Ireland and Beyond

Dermot Butler and Carl Nally
Flying Disk Press – 2018

The first half of this book is the boring, yet rather upsetting, account of the mutilation of hundreds of sheep on the McLaughlin’s farm in Derry. A bunch of sheep on this one particular farm had their tongues and eyeballs and other bits sliced out. The farmer believed this was being done by his neighbour, and he tried to get help from the local police force and government to put a stop to it. The police put up a few security cameras but wouldn’t let the farmer ever see the footage they captured. The authorities’ conclusion was that birds were responsible. The farmer didn’t agree that it was birds. The lad who he thought was responsible died, but the mutilations continued. The farmer was very upset that the authorities weren’t doing more to help him. It seemed like they were ignoring him.

There’s nothing about that story that’s hard to believe. Animals were being mutilated. There’s tonnes of evidence that show this. Before we go any further, ask yourself the following questions:

  • Are the police force and local politicians in Northern Ireland capable of not giving appropriate attention to the problems of one specific farmer farmer?
  • Are there people in Derry who are willing to act out on grudges that go back generations?
  • Are there any other possible explanations for the unfortunate mutilations of farm animals?

To me, it seems that the answer to all of these questions is a big fat yes. The authors of this book claim that the mutilations were caused by aliens. That seems unlikely to me, but I’m definitely willing to consider it. The difficulty for me is that the authors of this book claim that the authorities in Northern Ireland were trying to cover up the fact that the mutilations were caused by aliens.

Here’s another question:

  • Is it more likely that the authorities in Northern Ireland are so disorganized that they can’t deal with the problems of a single farmer or so organized that they are working together with global governments to cover up the existence of aliens?

I’m sorry, but this is silly. There’s a difference between being open-minded and gullible.

When it comes to this kind of stuff, I can suspend disbelief for the sake of entertainment, but after spending roughly half the book discussing real events that actually happened, the authors jump straight to quotes from the Old Testament to suggest that the mutilations on the McLaughlin’s farm were caused by aliens who are using sheep’s tongues to keep themselves alive for millennia. Come on guys, you’re supposed to ease us in. I need a little foreplay before you start quoting scripture at me. After this they go on to point out that over 100 legal firms refused to get involved in the case. They claim that this was because the legal firms were being intimidated by the government into refusing service, but it seems far more likely that the firms didn’t want to deal with the crazies that had attached themselves to the McLaughlins.

The authors go on to suggest that aliens are abducting and treating humans in the same way. They seem to believe we should all be very worried about this.

I want to believe. I really do, but this book wasn’t remotely convincing. The authors mention countless cases of animal mutilations and human disappearances, but there’s little here that sticks these cases together apart from paranoia and a willingness to ignore common sense.

The Possessors – John Christopher

I recently read T.E.D. Klein’s The Ceremonies, a horror novel that centers around a college instructor who is preparing a course on horror fiction. I have already read and reviewed most of the books that he discusses, but there were a few he mentioned that I had never heard of. This book, John Christopher’s The Possessors, was one of them.

The Possessors – John Christopher
Avon – 1966 (Originally published 1964)

An alien lifeform kills a child and possesses his body at a mountain cabin in Switzerland. The kid then starts possessing all of the other guests at the cabin. An infected person only has to touch your skin for a few minutes to pass on the infection. I’m using infection and possession in the same way here. You get fingered and turn into a cold alien.

This is basically Night of the Living Dead but with zombies that touch you up instead of eating you. It was published 3 years before that movie came out too, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Romero read this before shooting his film. The plot of The Possessors is pretty straightforward, and the story is predictable to an extent, but that didn’t bother me too much. It was the long-windedness of the writing that let me down.

There’s so much character building, and so little of it matters to the story. Maybe it’s supposed to help create tension, but it bored me. There’s an alcoholic character who is clearly destined to get possessed. She’s obviously a weak link who will jeopardize everything for everyone, and we know she’s going to get done away with. Despite this, Christopher provides details about her summer holidays as a girl and the names and fates of all her brothers and sisters and cousins and pets.

I think this is generally classified as science fiction rather than horror. Maybe that’s why I hadn’t heard of it. It’s quite similar to The Body Snatchers in both its premise and awkward classification status.

The Possessors wasn’t great. It’s a decent idea, but the pacing is just too slow. I think it would have been a much more exciting read if it were 30 pages shorter.

The Cryptoterrestrials – Mac Tonnies

The Cryptoterrestrials – Mac Tonnies
Anomalist Books – 2010

Aliens are real and they do abduct people, but they’re not from a different planet. I have encountered this idea before, but Mac Tonnies, in The Cryptoterrestrials, takes this concept one step further and claims that the reason we think that these aliens are extraterrestrial (from space) is because they have deliberately been misleading us.

A species or race of highly intelligent beings has been running a disinformation campaign against the human race so that they can avoid detection. These beings are probably not, as others (Whitley Strieber, John Keel and Kewaunee Lapseritis to name a few) have suggested, inhabitants of another dimension who occasionally cross over to ours. They are just as likely the descendants of a tribe of Asian people who went to live in a cave system hundreds of thousands of years ago. Their technology is more advanced than ours, and they can use it to send telepathic messages and to induce hallucinations.

Why should we believe this? Well, an awful lot of abductees claim that they were abducted for the purpose of creating a human-alien hybrid, but if you think about this for any amount of time it seems absurd. Dogs and cats are physically very similar and share common ancestors, but they can’t breed. How could a human possibly breed with a lifeform that evolved on a different planet? Nope, if these visitors are actually trying to breed with us to replenish their population, they must share a fairly recent common ancestor with us. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that they are slowly dying out as we destroy the planet. That’s why they need our DNA to reproduce.

The afterword in the book suggests that the author did not take the ideas in this book to be literally true and that this book was more an attempt to get people to rethink the UFO and abduction phenomena rather than to provide a definitive and factual explanation for these phenoma. There’s certainly some interesting ideas in here, but ultimately I think the book goes a bit overboard with its speculations.

When faced with the question of the existence of extraterrestrial aliens who abduct innocent human beings, most people will pick one of two explanations. Either they accept the notion of little men coming down in a spaceship and kidnapping/violating innocent farmers, or they dismiss it and assume that the farmers who gave the accounts were crazy and/or mistaken. There are of course other possible explanations, but if these explanations are no simpler than the two already mentioned then we can use Occam’s Razor to slice them off our list of considerations. Accepting the existence of extraterrestrials is already the more challenging option, and complicating this notion further by positing that the beings are actually Earth dwelling cryptids with a penchant for trickery is a step too far for this to remain a sensible line of reasoning.

I’m not saying that all abductees are wrong or that there isn’t weird forms of life that we don’t understand. I just think that the idea that these beings are deceiving us in such a complicated manner is too unlikely to take seriously.

Mac Tonnies died in 2010 when he was only 34. He was a fellow blogger, and he wrote a book about aliens being cryptids. It seems to me that he was probably a real cool guy. RIP.

The Goblin Universe – Ted Holiday

the goblin universe ted holidayThe Goblin Universe – Ted Holiday
Llewellyn Publications – 1986

The Goblin Universe is a very serious work of non-fiction. It was written in the late 70s, but remained unpublished during the author’s lifetime as he was apparently unsatisfied with it. He supposedly rewrote the entire thing and ended up with a very different final product that seems to have gone unpublished. After Ted Holiday’s death in 1977, his friend Colin Wilson convinced Holiday’s mother to allow him to publish the original Goblin Universe manuscript.

The above information comes from Wilson’s lengthy introduction to this book. I’ve seen several instances of Wilson being listed as the co-author for this one, but while there is definitely a similarity between Holiday’s conclusions and what I’ve read of Wilson’s own ideas, I reckon that the central text here is actually Holiday’s work. Wilson is too critical in his introduction for me to believe that he had much input into the central text. He acknowledges that “The Goblin Universe would never convert a single sceptic; in fact, it would probably make him more certain than ever that ‘the occult’ is a farrago of self-deception and muddled thinking.” This acknowledgement follows a paragraph in which Wilson claims that Holiday’s attempt to show that Gilles De Rais was reincarnated as Edward Paisnel “convinces no one – even the believers.” Wilson poopooing the work that he is introducing will come as no surprise to long time readers of this blog. He was even harsher in his introduction to Roberts and Gilbertson’s insanely paranoid Dark Gods. (I actually first heard of The Goblin Universe in Colin Wilson’s introduction to Dark Gods. His description therein of the Exorcism of Loch Ness that is recounted in Holiday’s book ensured that I would track the latter down. More on Dark Gods later.)

ted holday omand exorcising loch nessTed Holiday and Rev. Donald Omand performing an Exorcism of Loch Ness

So what the Hell is the Goblin Universe? I read this book fairly attentively, but I still don’t really know. It pisses me off when writers don’t explain their technical jargon, and Holiday completely fails to clarify the meaning of what is presumably the most important idea in his book. The phrase is exclusively used in very vague, confusing ways. I went through the book after reading it, and tried to note every time that the author uses the phrase “the Goblin Universe.” I have listed these instances here in an attempt to clarify his meaning:

Holiday claims that the ambiguity over the fact that photons can be observed as particles and as waves “is the very essence of the Goblin Universe”

“If we try to probe a little deeper into the mystery of being, we find ourselves in the Goblin Universe along with Alice having tea with mad hares in top hats. It is all great fun, but what does it mean?”

“The Goblin universe is the place in the play where the actor switches one mask for another”

“The Goblin Universe is a hall of distorting mirrors into which we are born with yelling protest.”

“The Hall of mirrors… is simply the external aspect of the Goblin Universe.”

“The Goblin Universe is a hydrogen bomb. Admit the truth about one thing and you will end up facing the truth about a thousand more, and your existing system blows up.”

“The Goblin Universe… will not be ignored.”

“medics [who] deny the Goblin Universe will never comprehend people like Graham Young.”
(Graham Young was a mass murderer who poisoned his family members. Holiday later claims that Young was possessed by a demon from a Nazi concentration camp.)

“To comprehend the Goblin Universe, we need a modified science of physics.”

“One or two of the real masters see everything, and they know how the Goblin Universe really functions.”

If I missed any instances of the phrase, I assure you, they were no more elucidating than the above.

According to Holiday, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, mermaids, satyrs, the Surrey Puma and all sorts of cryptids are real, but they probably don’t exist in the same way that we do. If they were simple creatures of flesh and blood, we would surely have caught some during the act of sexual intercourse. Holiday suggests that these cryptids are actually semi-physical entities that have been placed here by intelligences far greater than our own. The reason for this placement is unclear; these creatures may be appearing to us to send us a message, but they might also just be appearing to confuse us or shock us into a reaction. The superior intelligences that are sending these appearances to us are probably aliens, or at least what we think of as aliens, the creatures that travel in UFOs.  (Years ago they would have been considered fairies.) This can be proven by the fact that many cryptid sightings are preceded by UFO sightings in the same area. Oh, but some of the cryptids, particularly the ones that look like extinct creatures might just be ghosts.

vegetable manThis picture (presumably from another text) is included at the end of Holiday’s book with little context. A vegetable man.

Holiday goes on to claim that natural selection as the driving force of evolution is wrong. We actually evolve according to the desires of a mysterious yet intelligent force. This intelligent force may or may not be the same entity/group of entities that is causing the cryptids to appear. Holiday claims that our scientific method is incapable of describing these forces and must thus be torn down and rebuilt. Holiday accepts the reality of reincarnation, possession, astral projection, precognition and even the possibility of willing a human automaton into existence. Any new scientific method must be open enough to account for these phenomena.

I’ve come across ideas similar to these before, and I want to take a moment to discuss Holiday’s place in this kind of literature. In the introduction to this work, Wilson references the work of John A. Keel, Erich Von Däniken, Pauwels and Bergier, and T.C. Lethbridge, all authors whose work has already appeared on this blog, but in truth, Wilson’s own book, The Occult, was one of the first I read that used this kind of thinking. Holiday personally asked Wilson for comments on his work, so I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that he was writing in the same tradition. Just as Wilson’s work seems to have influenced Holiday’s, Holiday’s ideas seem to have had a major effect on Dark Gods by Anthony Roberts and Geoff Gilbertson. Holiday introduces the idea that a higher intelligence is causing cryptids to appear, and Roberts and Gilberston responded by affirming that this higher intelligence is malevolent.

This sequence is odd. Although The Goblin Universe was written several years before Dark Gods, it was actually published 6 years later. The influence might be explained by the authors’ mutual friendships with Wilson. Perhaps he had given them his copy of Holiday’s manuscript. (They probably would have asked to see it after reading about it in his introduction.) One of Holiday’s earlier books is also referenced in Dark Gods too, so either Roberts or Gilbertson knew of him already. I feel confident in saying that his ideas led on to theirs.

There’s lots of mental parts in this book. The author admits to having heard voices in his head. He claims that ghosts mostly appear in September because certain cosmic rays are shining parallel with Earth’s orbit rather than perpendicular to it. He believes that Uri Gellar is a real deal psychic, and he spends a chapter describing an exorcism at Loch Ness. Oh, and he also includes a ridiculous appendix on spirit photography written by our old friend Dr. Hans Holzer. There’s too much going on for the book to be coherent, even Wilson admits as much, but the general loopiness of the whole thing was entertaining.

I love this stuff.

 

 

 

 

The Psychic Sasquatch and their UFO Connection – Jack “Kewaunee” Lapseritis

the psychic sasquatch and their ufo connection - kewaunee lapseritisThe Psychic Sasquatch and their UFO Connection
Jack “Kewaunee” Lapseritis
Wildflower Press – 1998

With a title like The Psychic Sasquatch and their UFO Connection, it was only a matter of time before this book ended up on this blog. Surprisingly, it’s actually more stupid than you’d expect it to be. The basic idea here is that Sasquatches are inter-dimensional beings that can use their minds to speak with people. The reason there are so few pictures of them is that they can go into a different dimension by vibrating their molecules whenever they need to avoid detection. Oh, and they were brought to Earth by aliens. (Oddly enough, this is not the first book to appear on this blog about this topic.)

alien sasquatch

Yup, this is a mad one. It’s more new-agey than I hoped it would be, and it has that whole ‘science is too close-minded to account for this phenomena’ vibe running through it that we’ve encountered a hundred times before. I’d hate to actually meet a person who believed this nonsense. (They’d almost definitely be white and dread-locked with a collection of crystals.)

There’s also a confusing amount of Christianity in here too. I laughed when I read the following line in one of the first chapters, “The next morning I was sitting on the front porch reading the Bible when Bigfoot arrived and began talking to me.” Kewaunee concludes the book with a denial of human evolution too. The Book of Genesis is literally true. A psychic Sasquatch told the author that aliens put Adam and Eve on Earth. The aliens later brought down other people – this explains how we have different races. The aliens had brought Sasquatches down here long before humans though. Oh, and dinosaurs lived at the same time as humans. The author references a bunch of books on ancient aliens to back this up.

sasquatch

The nature of the Sasquatches’ telepathy is hard to wrap your head around. Kewaunee tells the tale of a pregnant Sasquatch telepathing to a woman to ask her to ask Kewaunee to help deliver her baby Sasquatch because he was a “master herbalist”. (Her sasquatch family couldn’t help because they were visiting another dimension.)
Why she didn’t ask the author directly is unclear. Kewaunee was able to receive messages from other Sasquatches, and when the Sasquatch baby was eventually born, Kewaunee was able to telepath to the mother to congratulate her, so distance was not the issue.

Also, apparently telepathy can operate consciously and unconsciously. You can send messages to people’s minds without them knowing about it. The author describes a woman sending telepathic messages to her husband that he simultaneously noticed and didn’t notice. I found this part really hard to understand.

I don’t want to get too involved in trying to explain or debate the absolutely stupid nonsense in this book, so I’ll just share a few interesting tidbits of information that I gathered from it:

  • Aliens and Sasquatches have underground research facilities in the mountains that they let some people visit occasionally.
  • There’s an island on the Connecticut River that is inhabited by a tribe of 50 prehistoric humans. They are roughly 4 foot tall and too fast to catch or photograph.
  • Sasquatch only stink when they’re scared, like a skunk.
  • Mermaids are real, but if you capture one, the American government will take it off you and destroy all evidence that you had it.
  • Sasquatches can trade bodies with people and birds.
  • Despite what many Bigfoot hunters believe, the Sasquatch people are the observers here, not us. If we want to talk to them, we have to act nicely in the hopes that they’ll want to talk to us.
  • The author, a master herbalist, had a herniated disc in his back and liver cancer, but refused allopathic medicine. An alien doctor cured him.
    alien doctor

Although this book was utterly ludicrous, it was also a serious pain to read. It’s very dense, very repetitive and very boring. I strongly recommend that you do not waste your time reading this foolish book of nonsense. Kewaunee has other books, but I probably won’t read them. Look him up on youtube though; he has a rather commendable mullet

J.N. Williamson’s Martin Ruben Series: The Ritual, Premonition and Brotherkind

martin ruben seriesHere’s three books by prolific horror author, J.N. Williamson. I had never read any of his books before reading these, and it is highly unlikely that I will ever read anything else by him again. The description of Brotherkind in Paperbacks from Hell ensured that I was going to track it down and review it here, but after buying it, I discovered that it was part of a series of 3 books: The Ritual, Premonition and Brotherkind. Naturally, I had to read all of them.

the ritual j. n. williamson
The Ritual – J.N. Williamson
BMI – 1987 (First published 1979)
A young boy turns out to be the Antichrist. His body becomes possessed by the spirits of Napoleon, Hitler Aleister Crowley and Genghis Khan, and he goes on a spree of rape and murder. Other people in his town also go a bit mad and start misbehaving. A local university professor and expert on the occult, Martin Ruben, is called in to deal with this issue. With the help of a priest, a police officer and one of his students, Ruben tries stop the Antichrist. This is just a shit version of The Omen.

If you don’t want spoilers, skip the next paragraph.

This book is really surprisingly shit. Most of the text is taken up with Ruben’s squad attempting to exorcise the kid through hypnosis, but in the end they just kill him. What a damn waste of time!

There’s no suspense, no mystery and no likable characters. This book also contains what might just be the worst line I’ve ever seen in a horror novel: “what Greg was doing had nothing to do with love or marriage and a great deal to do with rape.” Yuck. There are a couple of needlessly brutal rape scenes in here. I guess that’s what you have to resort to when you have no interesting ideas on how to scare people. I was looking forward to finishing this junk after only a few pages.

 

brotherkind j. n. williamsonBrotherkind – J.N. Williamson
Leisure Books – 1982

In J.N. Williamson’s brief profile at the back of Paperbacks from Hell, both Brotherkind and the Premonition are said to acheive an accident “lunatic grandiosity”, so I was hoping they’d be more fun than The Ritual. They are a little better, but they’re not good books.

The description of Brotherkind in Paperbacks from Hell makes it sound awesome. Bigfoot and a gang of aliens gang rape a woman in the first step of a plot to subjugate mankind, but their plans are eventually foiled by the rock’n’roll music of KISS. I mean, maybe that sounds unsavory to some, but probe my ass, it sounds amazing to me. Read that description again though. It took me a single sentence to give you all of the cool parts of this 283 page novel. Unfortunately, there’s nothing else in here of any worth. This is long, overwritten and surprisingly boring.

The book, while fiction, actually serves to expound Williamson’s sincere theories about the UFO phenomenon. He thinks that UFOs and their pilots are beings made of anti-matter that are actually from Earth. He thinks that they are contacting us to try to help up develop the side of our brains that we don’t use as much. I picked up Brotherkind right after finishing The Dark Gods by Anthony Roberts and Geoff Gilbertson, so my patience for bullshit theories about aliens was already wearing thin. Williamson lays out his ridiculously stupid ideas in great detail. This slows everything down and makes for a tedious reading experience. Between chapters, he includes lists of quotations from crackpots and alien researchers, including himself, and he actually ends the book with a page of quotations from The Eternal Man, one of the sequels to Pauwels and Bergier’s Morning of the Magicians. I’ve had that book on my shelf for many years, but I’ve avoided picking it up because I know how incredibly shit and dumb it will be.

The plot of Brotherkind is ridiculously  trashy, but it could have been awesome if Williamson had acknowledged this and gone with it. Instead, he absolutely ruins the book by trying to make it thought provoking and clever. What a waste.

 

premonition j. n. williamson

Premonition – J.N. Williamson
Leisure Books – 1981

By the time I got around to reading Premonition, I was well and truly sick of this series. I didn’t want to read this at all, and I ended up mostly skimming through large sections of the book. This method actually enhanced my enjoyment of the story greatly, and I reckon that this book and Brotherkind would have greatly benefited if 100 pages had been cut from each. The stories in these two are mental enough to be entertaining, but they get bogged down in boring details. I know publishers used to charge more money for longer books, so maybe these were originally good stories that Williamson ruined for some extra cash.

Brotherkind had a mental storyline, but I reckon Premonition is probably the wackiest of this series.

Ruben goes to work for Solomon Studies in an abandoned amusement park on an isolated island. It turns out that his boss is the reincarnation of King Solomon, and her company is secretly trying to develop a way to prolong life indefinitely. Unfortunately, the island where they have their headquarters is also home to a sex demon that is made of cancer. Also, one of the doctors working there, a former Nazi, has cloned a pterodactyl. Eventually this pterodactyl teams up with a magical hermaphrodite midget to put a stop to the cancer demon. I’m not joking.

Like I said, I flicked through this one pretty rapidly, mainly just skimming for the important points of the plot. There was one passage that jumped out to me though. It’s a scene in which a hospital worker is verbally abusing an elderly patient to prove to Ruben that the old man is in a catatonic state. He shouts, “you’re a useless piece of excrement on life’s shoals, a chunk of fleshy shit caught on the rocks”. I laughed heartily at that, both when I read it and again when I was typing it out. Think about what that would look like. For a shit to be described as ‘fleshy’, it would have to have some girth to it. You wouldn’t use the word fleshy to describe a stringy little turd. It’s the next deductive step that provides the big laughs though: for a shit to be girthy, the person who did it must have had a stretched anus. The hospital worker is telling the man in a vegetative state that he is a big poo from a big bumhole. This made the book worth reading.

premonition williamsonThis is the image from the cover, un-negatived. I wonder who she is.

These books share a central character, but they’re not much of a series. The timeline is all messed up. Aside from Martin Ruben, there is one other character who appears in all three books, but he actually dies in the first one. In terms of publishing, The Ritual came first, then Premonition and then Brotherkind, but the timeline of the actual stories is quite different. Premonition comes first, and then The Ritual and Brotherkind take place at the same time. There’s a single mention in Brotherkind of the stuff that’s happening in The Ritual, but Williamson didn’t have the foresight to include events from the unwritten Brotherkind in The Ritual. The characters must be incredibly talented at compartmentalizing their lives. They simultaneously save the world from the Antichrist while also preventing an invasion of alien rapists, and they do so without letting one event even remotely interfere with the other.

All in all, this series was terrible. There’s some silly ideas in here that could have been entertaining, but these books are boring and unpleasant to read.

Secret Cipher of the UFOnauts and Secret Rituals of the Men in Black by Allen H. Greenfield

secret cipher of the ufonauts secret rituals of the men in black greenfieldSecret Cipher of the UFOnauts 
Secret Rituals of the Men in Black
Allen H. Greenfield

Here are two books by the same author that make up one whole. Let me attempt to briefly summarise their contents:

Humanity has been in contact with ultraterrestrial forces for millennia. A kind of merman from Sirius came down to Earth a long time ago and taught us how to organise civilisation.

The secret wisdom of the fish god has been passed down through the coded messages of myths and the ciphered language of the rituals of secret societies. Very few humans still understand the true messages behind these stories and rites. Magic is ultraterrestrial technology, and most, if not all, aspects of the Occult relate to this technology.

summoning alien.jpg
In 1904, Aleister Crowley received messages from Aiwass, a discarnate entity. Within these messages was a key to the ciphered messages of the UFOnauts (ultraterrestrials), but despite his efforts, Crowley wasn’t able to find the key within the message that he himself had channeled. Some of Crowley’s followers discovered the key to the cipher in the 70s.

Allen Greenfield, the author of these books, claims that this key unlocks the meanings of the nonsensical names of aliens and planets given by UFO contactees. It also decodes elements of the secret rituals of certain masonic fraternities.

The deciphered meaning of these terms and rituals gives credence to the claim that ultraterrestrials have long been meddling in human affairs. Some aliens seem to be good, but others are pretty bad.

These books are not easy reading, but that’s their basic message as far as I can tell. The evidence given for these claims is fairly cabbalistic, and I don’t have the background or the patience to assess it properly. I read every word in the book, but entire paragraphs went entirely over my head. There’s a lot of references to different contactee cases that I am only mildly familiar with and a good deal of discussion on different aspects of freemasonry that I didn’t get at all.

I feel that things might have made more sense to me if I had already read Robert Temple’s The Sirius Mystery. It’s mentioned quite a few times in here. I’ve had a copy of this book on my shelf for years, bit I’ve found it tough to work up enough courage to actually read it. I suppose I should really look through it before delving any deeper into UFO lore.

Philip K. Dick’s VALIS was also mentioned in here quite a few times. VALIS was one of the first of Dick’s novels I read, and I remember finding it quite confusing at the time. I wonder if it’d make more sense to me now. I thought it was pretty cool to see Dick’s work being discussed alongside Crowley’s.

The main texts of both Secret Cipher and Secret Rituals are followed by interviews with an individual who calls himself Terry R. Wriste, and these interviews contain the most entertaining, most straightforward and most unbelievable parts of the books. In one of them, this Wriste guy describes being part of an underground shootout between a group of Vietnam veterans and a bunch of aliens. Wriste was one of the only survivors. In the other interview, he claims that UFOs can be shot down with sex energy. So remember, if you’re ever about to be abducted by an alien, just whip out your dick or pussy and rub it in their direction. They’ll disappear.

Robert Anton Wilson described Secret Cipher as “A very strange book, even for the field of UFOlogy”, and I have to agree with him. This stuff is mental. It was nice reading it so soon after Dark Gods by Roberts and Gilbertson as that book discusses a lot of the same cases. I cut down on the alien books after reviewing a bunch of new-age channeling nonsense a few years ago, but the books I’ve been reading recently have got me interested again. I’ve been enjoying the way they bring other aspects of the Occult to their discussions.

I’ve found it a bit tricky to figure out accurate publishing information for Greenfield’s books. The first one, Secret Cipher, was originally published in 1994.  I’m not sure when the second one, Secret Rituals, was published, but I know it wasn’t after 1995. I read the 2005 digital editions of both texts. (Secret Cipher of the UFOnauts, Secret Rituals of the Men in Black) The texts are about the same thing, and I’m certain they’re meant to be read together. A few years ago, the author put out another book, The Complete Secret Cipher of the UFOnauts. I haven’t been able to verify this, but it seems probable to me that that text is just the other two books stuck together.