Catholicism, Conspiracies and Consciousness: Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger Trilogy

Robert Anton Wilson has been a hero of mine for quite a while. His Illuminatus! Trilogy was one of the first books I read for this blog. My reviews of his The Sex Magicians and Masks of the Illuminati are probably the best pieces of writing I’ve published. I’ve read a couple more of his books since posting those, but the contents of The Book of the Breast and Quantum Psychology aren’t exactly Nocturnal Revelries material.

I’ve been reading a lot of books about conspiracies recently, and digging in this field this has led me to an absolutely bizarre individual called James Shelby Downard. There are rumours online that he’s not a real person, and that was was made up by Adam Parfrey and Michael Hoffman II for an essay published in Parfrey’s Apocalypse Culture from 1987. This confused me as I had read that Robert Anton Wilson had mentioned Shelby in Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati, the first part of Wilson’s “autobiography”, in 1977. There’s actually a quote on the cover of Shelby’s autobiography from Wilson that says, “the most absurd, the most incredible, the most ridiculous Illuminati theory of them all”. I thought it only responsible to see what Wilson had to say about Downard, so I read all three entries of the Cosmic Trigger series.

So these books aren’t really an autobiography. There’s autobiographical elements, especially in the second volume, but, as a whole, they’re more a collection of Wilson’s big ideas and how he came to adopt them.

Final Secret of the Illuminati – 1977

The first book wasn’t that great. I’ve watched enough video lectures of Wilson to know his general outlook, and none of the stuff on Timothy Leary, the Illuminati, Discordianism, Aleister Crowley, and the author’s own alien contact came as a surprise to me. One of the big things that Wilson pushes is the idea of reality tunnels and how truth, by his definition, is relative. I accept this idea, and Wilson’s linguistic philosophy is one of my favourite things about him, but the examples he provides in this book are ridiculous. One of his favourite books at the time of writing this was Robert Temple’s The Sirius Connection, one of the worst pieces of crap I’ve ever read. He also presents the psychic powers of Uri Gellar as evidence for some of his claims. I was a bit surprised that a person who I thought was intelligent had been duped by such garbage. Also, there’s a bit near the end where Wilson presents Timothy Leary’s 8-circuit model of consciousness in significant detail. Admittedly, I am not a cognitive neuroscientist, but this idea absolutely stank of shit to me. The book ends with Wilson’s kid dying. This was heartbreaking to read, and I wonder if it had something to do with the second half of the book being far worse than the first.

Down to Earth – 1991

Part 2 was by far the most enjoyable in the Cosmic Trigger series. Wilson tells more of his life story in this one, and he comes across as the witty, interesting guy I know he was. He had spent much of the time between writing this and the first book in Ireland, and this is apparent in his writing. Much of the book is taken up with discussions on his “Irish” upbringing, James Joyce and the modern Irish legal system. He also gets into the P2 conspiracy. Honestly, you could read and enjoy this one without picking up the other 2 entries in the series. It actually deals with the earliest parts of his life more thoroughly than the first entry in the series, so it’d be a fine starting point.

My Life after Death – 1995

I don’t know if I’d been reading too much of the one author or that this book is just worse than the others, but I didn’t hugely enjoy the last entry in the series. Wilson had already covered most of his important life experiences in the previous books, and this one came out only 4 years after the preceding entry. Does enough stuff happen between the ages of 59 and 64 to warrant a new entry in an autobiography? Apparently not. Instead of offering new, insightful ways of thinking about the world, Wilson instead fills this book with cringeworthy claims about the threat of political correctness and how society oppresses men more than women. I am quite sure that Wilson wasn’t a bad guy, but these tirades are hard to stomach in 2024. Don’t get me wrong. I accept that some of the ways that people currently expect others to use language are utterly ridiculous, but in my experience, the people who are complaining about political correctness and “wokeism” are usually assholes. Again, I’ve read enough of Wilson to know that he wasn’t anything close to a bigot, and he does make some valid points about identity politics, but the way he sets his arguments up are a little too similar to your Trump voting uncle’s facebook posts. At one point he asks why there’s no such thing as a straight pride parade. Sigh. There’s some discussion of the Priory of Sion mysteries here, and it seems that Wilson had encountered similar ideas on this topic to Tracy Twyman’s. He also discusses Orson Welles, Shakespeare and Elmyr, the art forger. This wasn’t as interesting as the other books, but it’s still worth a read.

I read these books because I’m going through a conspiracy theory phase at the moment, and Robert Anton Wilson is something of a conspiracy expert. He does discuss multiple conspiracies in these books, but he’s using conspiracies as a way to explain his worldview rather than adding a huge amount to conspiracy lore. Some of his ideas were a bit naïve and/or silly, but Wilson was always self aware enough to avoid coming across as a complete tool. He also had a lot of really good ideas, and I think his ideas on language should be more widely read. The Cosmic Trigger books were amusing overall, and they’re probably an easier starting point than the author’s fiction. I’m sure I’ll get around to more of that in the future.

Beware the Rock People! Tom Dongo’s The Mysteries of Sedona

A long time ago, I read a book called Unseen Beings, Unseen Worlds by a guy named Tom Dongo. When I wrote about it here, I was relatively critical of it. Years later, somebody commented on a blog post I had written on Mac Tonnies’ Cryptoterrestrials claiming that I had given Tonnies preferential treatment to Dongo. This made me think. Had I changed, or was Dongo’s book actually deserving of more disdain than Tonnies’? I thought I’d better give Dongo another chance, so I read The Mysteries of Sedona, the first entry in his Sedona series.

The Mysteries of Sedona: The New Age Frontier

Dongo lives in a place called Sedona in Arizona, and he claims that it’s a hotspot of psychic energy. This very short book describes some of the phenomena he has observed and heard about. There are some bog standard accounts of UFO sightings and psychic channellings that aren’t remotely convincing. He spends a lot of the book describing vortices where you can meditate and become one with the cosmic consciousness. This book reads like a pamphlet for unbearable new-age, hippy-dippy asshole tourists.

Honestly, there’s only 2 interesting claims made in this book of trash. The first being that Sedona is actually in the same place as the lost continent of Lemuria and that’s why it has so much psychic energy. Lemuria, of course, never existed, but that doesn’t make much of a difference to the fools who read this garbage.

Dongo also claims that parts of Sedona are inhabited by rock goblins. They aren’t visible to everyone, but Dongo can see them and they look like this:

This reminded me of the Kentucky Goblins case. I recently started watching that Hellier series that came out a few years ago. I was intrigued by the mentions of the elusive Terry Wrist in the first episode, and I liked where things were going with the mothman discussions, but when the team turned to tarot cards to guide their investigation, I turned off the TV in a fit of rage.

Dongo’s work is as bad as I made it out to be all those years ago. This book is utter nonsense. At one point the author suggests that school children be forced to take a class in channelling extraterrestrial spirits. I think I said it best in 2016 when I described Dongo’s writing as “bunch of ridiculous ideas that popped into the head of a stupid weirdo.”

Robert K.G. Temple’s The Sirius Mystery: Did Mermaid Aliens from the Sirius Star System Save Humanity?

**Destiny Books – 1987 (Originally published 1976)**

The Sirius Mystery: Was Earth visited by intelligent beings from a planet in the system of the star of Sirius? – Robert K.G. Temple

I frequently come across mentions of the star Sirius in my reading, and I have long planned to read Robert K.G. Temple’s The Sirius Connection. I’ve had a copy for ages, but I overdid it on ancient aliens books a few years ago, and I’m usually a bit hesitant to start books over 300 pages. I’ve read a few long books recently that I had been putting off and I ended up enjoying them. One of them, S.K. Bain’s 9/11 as Mass Ritual, references Sirius, and this gave me the encouragement I needed to finally pick up Temple’s book.

Jesus, this was atrocious, truly a pile of shit.

There’s a tribe in Mali, the Dogon people, that claim that amphibious aliens from the Sirius Star system came down to Earth around 5000 years ago. We should believe them because they know about a tiny little star in that system that’s invisible without a telescope. If you look back at the myths of the ancient Greeks, Egyptians and Sumerians, they all confirm this.

Most of the book is dedicated to proving the last (and least interesting) sentence in the above paragraph. Temple discusses every myth he can find that mentions Sirius, dogs, the number 50 or anything that rhymes with those words in ancient Greek, Egyptian or Sumerian. There’s nothing of any substance here at all, and the writing is extremely dense. If you don’t have a strong knowledge of mythology, most of the “evidence” will be too boring to meaningfully contemplate. I know a bit about mythology, and I couldn’t tolerate it at all. The chapters in this section are all followed by a summary because Temple acknowledges that what he has written is confusing. I mostly skimmed over these chapters and focused on the summaries, but nothing jumped out at me as even remotely convincing.

The idea of the fishy aliens is pretty cool, but Temple largely sticks to discussing the myths of the Dogon tribe and doesn’t speculate much. He mostly just talks about mermaids from mythology. Honestly, I didn’t get much out of this book that isn’t available on its wikipedia entry. At this point, it seems generally accepted that the Dogon people had been fed the information about Sirius B, the invisible star, by a European visitor.

Sirius does pop up a lot in my field of interest. It’s central to Kenneth Grant’s Typhonian tradition, and Robert Anton Wilson believed that aliens in the Sirius system have been sending humans, including himself, telepathic messages for millennia. I was never particularly hopeful that Temple’s book would provide a convincing argument for his claims, but I had hoped that it would approach the mysterious star system in a more interesting manner. I would far prefer to read a bat-shit crazy book about ludicrous beliefs than this pseudo-scholarly cowpat. There’s a few editions of this book. I looked through the original edition, an abridged version and an updated version from the late 1990s. Don’t waste your time with any of them.

Milton William Cooper’s Behold A Pale Horse: A Blueprint for the X-Files

WAKE UP SHEEPLE!

The hole in the ozone layer was made by people to let excess heat escape into space. There are colonies on the moon and mars. JFK was killed by his driver because he was going to tell the public about aliens. Whitley Strieber is an agent of the CIA. 600 aliens live with Bo Gritz in Area 51. Tobacco is purposely grown in fields covered in uranium so that more smokers will get cancer. Timothy Leary was an MK ULTRA agent. The Pope made the gas canisters used in German concentration camps.

Oh and the Illuminati run everything, AIDs was invented to kill homosexuals and black people, and the human race is just an alien experiment, but I’m assuming you knew all of that already.

Behold A Pale Horse – Milton William Cooper

**Light Technology Publications – 1991**

Yes, I finally got around to reading Bill Cooper’s conspiracy classic, Behold A Pale Horse, the book that served as a blueprint for the X-Files. I’ve known of its existence for a long time, but it’s over 500 pages of intense paranoia, and I didn’t want to put myself through it. What I didn’t realise was that it’s not exactly a cohesive work, and you don’t actually have to read every single part of it to get the idea. Much of it is scans of letters, newspaper clippings and bizarre documents.

To try and summarise this book would be pointless. Cooper is so paranoid that he doesn’t really commit to any specific theory. At times he seems confident that there are aliens living on Earth, but then he points out that he might only think that because that’s what the Illuminati want him to think. At one point he claims that the apparition at Fatima was a warning in which aliens showed children a hologram video of the actual crucifixion of Christ. He then ruminates on whether the aliens actually travelled back in time to record the crucifixion or if they just animated it themselves. He then goes on to point out that if they have the power to do either of those things, they may have staged the entire Jesus thing for their own purposes. Trust no-one.

Ultimately, I quite enjoyed Behold A Pale Horse. I also got the names of several other books I’ll be trying to track down in the near future. I assume that those books will also be complete rubbish, and I only hope that they are as sincere as this bizarre masterpiece. I don’t know if it’s the frenzied nature of Cooper’s writing or the knowledge of what happened to him after writing this book that makes his writing captivating.

Pale Horse Rider: William Cooper, the Rise of Conspiracy, and the Fall of Trust in America – Mark Jacobson

Directly after finishing Behold A Pale Horse, I read Mark Jacobson’s Pale Horse Rider, a book that analyzes Cooper’s life and works. Much of what it covers is contained in Behold A Pale Horse, but it’s reassuring to have somebody sane confirm that Cooper did actually mean the things that you’ve just read in his book.

Pale Horse Rider also covers Cooper’s radio show, his surprisingly powerful following in the hip-hop community, his shockingly accurate prediction of 9/11, and his unfortunate end. William Cooper spent his last months living alone on a mountaintop convinced the police were going to come and kill him. The police eventually came up the mountain and shot him in the head.

One thing that this book briefly mentions about Cooper’s life that is not included in Behold A Pale Horse is the time he spent in a mental institution after returning from Vietnam. He was crazy in the literal sense. He also seems to have been an unpleasant person to be around, an angry, paranoid mad man. I’d say I wish he was still alive, but part of him still is. Alex Jones is basically a poor man’s Bill Cooper, and a lot of the right-wing militia style conspiracists seem to have admired Cooper. Timothy McVeigh came to visit him before bombing Oklahoma. Cooper did include a photocopy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Behold A Pale Horse, and he loved the 2nd amendment, but his politics weren’t as cut-and-dry as many of his ilk today. I’d like to think of him dismissing Q-Anon and Pizzagate as Bilderberg disinformation campaigns to make truth-seekers look stupid. (I mean… that’s what they are, right?)

I recommend reading both Cooper’s own book and Jacobson’s book about Cooper, but if you are a normal person, the latter will probably suffice. It’s very entertaining.

I don’t know what it is, but I’ve been really into conspiracy theories since reading Programmed to Kill and JFK and UFO recently. It’s a field I’ve been avoiding for a few years, but I’m quite enjoying it at the moment. More to come soon!

2023, The Year in Review

I’ve had a pretty good 2023, but it was an odd year for this blog. In March, Google updated its algorithm and decimated the amount of traffic this site sees. This is particularly disappointing as I had more fun with this blog in 2023 than I’ve had for ages. After a few years of largely focusing on fiction, I forced myself to alternate between fiction and non-fiction on a weekly basis. This led me to some very weird books indeed. (All of the following images are links to the respective blog posts.)

I did a trilogy of posts on bizarre books about bizarre cryptids. How I wish I could ring in the New Year with Pigman, Goatman and Lizardman.

I also read a lot of true crime books this year. I don’t know why I hadn’t paid more attention to this genre earlier. Nearly all of the crime books I read had an occult/satanic/conspiracy angle to them. Some of these books were very upsetting to read, but they definitely renewed my interest in blogging. It’s terrifying how frequently texts, characters and authors I have covered here popped up in these books.

I think I read less than 15 non-fiction books during 2021 and 2022, so it was refreshing to spend so much time learning about the real world this year. I read plenty of fiction too, and most of it was of the Paperbacks from Hell variety. Some of these books were good. Others, especially Bradley Snow’s Andy, were truly awful.

My annual blog traffic. The beginning of the end?

It has been a bummer to see my traffic dropping. I blame google for this, but I have also been cutting down on social media in the last few years, and that may have made things worse too. Twitter was the only site I was still using last year, but Elon Musk is a piece of dog’s filth, so I only use twitter to link my weekly post at this point. (Even that is almost useless.) I guess we’re living in the era of the podcast now. I’d move on and try that, but I’d have nobody to do it with. I put a lot of work into this blog, and although it’s ultimately for my own enjoyment, it’s nice to get a bit of recognition now and then. Please share this website with anyone you know who would be interested, and comment or email me if you have suggestions.

Here are some more from this year:

Another thing I’ve noticed this year is an increase in requests from authors for me to read their novels. This always amuses me. Have these stupid bastards ever looked through the blog? I rarely read new books, and I trash 95% of the books I review. Keep your shitty steampunk zombie novel to yourself, you sad virgins. Also, speaking of bad amateur fiction, I don’t think many people got around to reading the short story I put out this year.

I’ll end this the same way I do every year. I’ve written posts like this for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022. Look on my works ye mighty and despair. You can also check out my index page for individual links to the 500+ books I have reviewed here so far. Also, check back soon. I have some good stuff coming up.

I sincerely wish you all a happy New Year!

Fred Lee Crisman, The CIA’s Agent of Disruption – JFK & UFO by Kenn Thomas

JFK & UFO: Military Industrial Conspriacy and Cover-Up from Maury Island to Dallas – Kenn Thomas

This is a book about conspiracies, but the author, probably to avoid being deemed a loony, doesn’t really outline the specific conspiracy he’s trying to push. He instead offers a bunch of sources and accounts of things that did happen (or were at least reported to have have happened) and lets the reader decide what to believe for themselves. This is more tolerable than some of the wacko bullshit I’ve read, but some of the things in here are so far removed from each other that it’s very hard to piece them together, and I think I would have preferred a bit more nudging from the author. There were a couple of points in the book where I wondered how what I was reading had anything to do with the rest of the book.

The book is called JFK & UFO. These are obviously 2 of the most popular topics for conspiracy theorists to discuss, but how are they linked? I was expecting the connection to be tenuous, but it’s actually pretty solid. It focuses around one Fred Lee Crisman, a teacher and radio talk show host from Tacoma Washington. There has been plenty written about this man, but it’s very difficult to determine what’s true and what’s bullshit. This is true of many historical figures, but it’s particularly difficult in this case as much of the disinformation about Fred’s life came directly from Fred.

In 1947, a guy named Harold Dahl, his son, dog and a couple of others saw a UFO dumping waste into the ocean near Maury Island, just off the coast of Washington. The waste was so hot it killed the dog and burned Dahl’s son. When Dahl came back to the harbour, he told his associate, Fred Chisman, what happened. (The nature of Dahl and Crisman’s relationship varies depending on the account.) Crisman went out to take a look for himself and came back with some of the stuff that the UFO had been dumping into the ocean. This part is hard to swallow. UFOs don’t generally hang around long enough for people to come back to take a second look. Apparently a Man in Black approached Dahl soon thereafter and warned him not to tell anyone about what he had seen.

All of this happened just a few days before Kenneth Arnold’s infamous UFO sighting, and Arnold, the UFO celebrity, was sent out by Raymond A. Palmer, the editor of Amazing Stories Magazine, to interview the 2 men about their encounter. It turns out that Fred Crisman had been featured in Amazing Stories a few months prior to the sighting. He had written a letter describing a shootout with subterranean hominids in a cave in Burma. Coincidental, right?

Given Palmer and Crisman’s former association, the UFO sighting sounds like a hoax. The only thing that gives the story any believability is the fact that 2 guys from the army flew out to take samples of the waste that Crisman had collected. On the way back to their base, their plane crashed, and they both died. The UFO waste was never recovered.

Crisman went back to school after this. Then he rejoined the military to fight in the Korean war. Then he became a teacher, the director of the Western Division of the Parapsychological Society and later a “roving personnel representative” for Boeing. It has been claimed that Crisman was actually part of a top secret department of the CIA that specialised in disruption. This guy would basically integrate into a group or company and then cause as much havoc as possible. It’s not that hard to believe he was up to something odd when you consider the range of experience on Crisman’s resume.

At some point he was also a Bishop of the Universal Life Church too. This set off alarm bells in my head. I remember reading Simon’s Dead Names: The Dark History of the Necronomicon and taking an interest in its discussion of wandering bishops and the potential role they played in the Kennedy assassination. Crisman knew Clay Shaw, the man Jim Garrison accused of murdering JFK, and it may well have been through their church links. David Ferrie, one of Shaw’s alleged co-conspirators was also a “Bishop”. These churches were fronts to avoid paying taxes and maintain secrecy. Garrison believed that Ferrie and Shaw had conspired to frame Oswald. After reading this book and doing a bit of research, I think the idea is that they may have done so at the suggestion of Crisman. I’m not saying I believe that’s what happened. I just think that’s the juiciest interpretation. Crisman was the first person that Shaw called after being charged with the murder of JFK. He was also allegedly arrested and photographed at the scene of the assassination. Garrison couldn’t prove anything, and Crisman went on to become the host of a far-right talk show in Washington.

Towards the end of the book, the author mentions the David Casalaro/Octopus conspiracy. For those of you who don’t know, Casalaro was journalist was found dead in a hotel apartment after going to meet mysterious contact that was going to provide him with details on a huge conspiracy about Reagan, hostages in Iran and some dodgy software. He had referred to the contact as “The Octopus”. I knew Kenn Thomas had written another book about this topic, and when I saw it popping up in here, I almost rolled my eyes. Surely this was just another conspiracy writer trying to link two completely separate things? Nope. Michael Riconosciuto, one of the central figures in that conspiracy, knew Fred Crisman well. Fred was friends with Michael’s father. This link is interesting enough, but in an interview at the end of the book, Michael drops a bombshell and claims that the UFO seen at Maury Island in 1947 was actually an experimental aircraft that Boeing was working on. He claims to have a diary from Crisman acknowledging this.

Ok, I don’t know how closely you’ve been following along, but that Boeing/UFO claim ties everything together and turns a seemingly bizarre sequence of random events into a terrifying conspiracy. That Crisman worked for Boeing at one point is certain. He was supposedly an expert in disruption. The whole Maury Island affair may have been Crisman’s plan to save Boeing from getting into trouble. Did he have something to do with blowing up the airplane to prevent the military from analyzing the evidence? Even worse, a few days before JFK was killed, his government had awarded a huge contract to General Dynamics for a new fighter plane. This contract had been expected to go to Boeing. Who would Boeing go to to get revenge for this? Kennedy wasn’t exactly Mr. Popular with the CIA either.

I’m just scratching the surface here. I’m no expert on this stuff, and I breezed through this book quickly. Writing this blog post forced me to reevaluate how convincing Kenn Thomas’s case for a conspiracy is. This guy Fred Crisman was definitely involved in something shady.

I really enjoyed reading this book and writing this post. The realm of conspiracy theories has seemed trite in recent years, but it was nice to read something that seemed mental but had enough substance to really make me think. I’ll consider reading more Kenn Thomas in the future.

Want to Talk to Aliens? How to Contact Space People by Ted Owens

How to Contact Space People – Ted Owens

I don’t remember when or where I heard of this book, but I found a pdf copy on my phone a few weeks ago, and the cover was so pathetic that I knew I’d have to read it. I assumed that image was an alien, but after finishing the book, I am not sure what it’s supposed to depict. The Saucer intelligences (“Si’s” from here onwards) discussed in this book have insect heads. Perhaps it’s a self portrait by the author.

Truly, this is one of the weirdest books I have read. It’s utterly mental, but the most exceptional aspect is the author’s elevated opinion of himself. He boasts as if he were a stupid 5 year old who doesn’t get to socialize much. It’s truly cringeworthy. I’m going to spend this post summarizing the text so that you don’t have to read it. If my summary seems illogical and full of non-sequiturs, that’s because it’s a summary of an awful piece of writing. I want to make sure I include the most interesting bits so that nobody else has to read this insane pile of shit.

The book starts off with an embarrassing collection of statements about author’s ability to forecast, start and influence the paths of storms. He is also able to summon UFOs, lightning and massive blackouts.

He claims his life changed after seeing a UFO. Soon thereafter, he discovered he could change the weather. He prevented many droughts and ecological problems by doing so. He easily convinced NASA and the CIA of his abilities.

He admits that he was kicked out of Texas for practicing medicine without a license. He was hypnotizing people.

He goes on to present a bunch more of the 181 accurate predictions that he made with the aid of extraterrestrial intelligence. Some of these stories are bizarre.

He recounts the story of a 400lb moldy-smelling monster attacking a girl and smashing her head. Si’s caused this to happen, but they are not bad. Even though their monster gave the girl a black eye and “kept banging her head on the side of the car”, it didn’t actually hurt her. This was just to get attention.

Some police officers shot at a flying saucer and the aliens then ruined their lives. This seems petty for all-knowing beings who want what’s best for us, but it turns out their technology, even though it can’t be harmed, automatically responds to negativity with negativity. This seems like a pretty serious design flaw.

There’s some more monster appearances and blackouts. The Si’s are dicks.

After 50 pages of evidence of the author’s trustworthiness and success, we get to the 5 pages that actually tell the reader how to contact space people. Basically all you have to do is imagine that you are talking to some little insects in a different dimension and you just tell them what to do. They will do what you ask 88% of the time, but there is a 12% chance “a time window” will make it impossible for them to act on our dimension. The aliens you deal with will be Tweeter and Twitter at the beginning but they may introduce you to their leader who is actually just an illusion.

Honestly, Owens’ instructions consist of 5 pages of telling the reader to make believe.

The second section in book is an interview between Owens and a teenage boy. It’s agonizing. Only an idiot child could have tolerated talking to this man for long enough to conduct an interview.

Apparently Owens could heal people with broken skulls who doctors had given up on. He practically brought dead people back to life.

There’s an incredible section where he recounts manly deeds confronting “toughs” and threatening gangsters. He claims he could do so because of Si protection. Seriously, he talks about himself as if he’s Jean-Claude Van Damme. He can turn a hitman away with just an icy stare.

He then presents the boy with crayon drawings of the aliens. Unfortunately these pictures are not included in the book. I bet they were really good.

Owens claims he is the first human since Moses with the brain capacity to be in constant communication with the Si’s. This is where his boasting gets out of hand. This man comes across as an utterly abhorrent wanker.

“I became a hypnotist at 13, an expert on voodoo and juju when I was 10, and so forth. I mastered more than 20 professions through the years – not as a jack-of-all-trades, but I mastered these professions.”

He can move objects with his mind.

The Si’s killed 3 astronauts when they were angry with US government. Owens claims that the Si’s will allow the world to end if the American government does not start doing what they want by 1970.

Prayers work if they are directed at the Si’s. He says that the millions of Jews who died in the Holocaust were praying to wrong power. Yikes.

Bigfoots are the Si’s pets.

In the final section Owens starts discussing Oi’s as if he had already explained them. Oi’s are bad aliens who are not as smart as the Si’s.

The author is actually the cause of all hurricanes in the US.

A couple of pages before the end of the book PK man drops this bombshell:

Owens believes himself to be the only human who can prevent the end of the world. Si’s chose him to be the saviour. In the next few paragraphs he compares himself to Jesus.

Ted Owens claims he was a tough guy, master of all trades, psychic saviour of mankind. I reckon he was actually a deluded twat.

I also noticed that Owens claims responsibility for the strange path of Hurricane Inez in 1966:

This is interesting. When speaking of the trajectory of Hurricane Inez in Sympathy for the Devil: The True Story of The Process Church of the Final Judgment, Timothy Wylie claims, “The thing veered off course… It comes straight towards us and at the last moment it just starts to go down the coast. Of course, we felt validated because we’d meditated and we’d asked the beings to make sure it didn’t you know, hit us, so it was a major validation. Hurricane Inez really consolidated our belief.” Did Owen’s Si’s and the “beings” in contact with the Process work together? Were they the same beings? Were The Process also a bunch of idiots?

Ted Owens was cuckoo insane. Some people believed him though. Jefferey Mishlove wrote a book about how great he was in 2000. I couldn’t bring myself to read that book, but I watched a few of Jeff’s videos on youtube… jesus. I shouldn’t get surprised when I dig into this kinda stuff, but I do. What the Hell is wrong with people?

Lee Brickley’s British Cryptids: Bigfoot, Werewolves and the Pig-Man

Blimey chaps! To celebrate the king’s coronation, we’re ‘avin’ a gander at two books from me mate, Lee Brickley, a paranormal researcher from England, innit?

On the Hunt for the British Bigfoot

I don’t think Sasquatch exists. The Pacific Northwest has some of the biggest forests in the world, but people go into these forests every day, and everyone has had a camera on their phones for at least 10 years now. There’s no proof, and the likelihood of proof showing up becomes less and less likely every day. I sincerely hope I am wrong about this, but I doubt we’ll ever find Bigfoot.

Lee Brickley is a paranormal researcher from England. He wrote a book about the British Bigfoot. He claims this creature lives in Cannock Chase. Cannock Chase is a 26 square mile forest in the West Midlands of England. This book recounts several incidents that Brickley and others had with the beast.

Most of these incidents happened within a couple of years of each other, and nearly all of them happened at night. One witness literally claims that the beast looked like “some huge bloke in a monkey costume”, and when Brickley saw the beast himself, a feeling of awe overtook him and he forgot to take out his camera to take a picture… sure.

Brickley claims that he has a frozen footprint in his freezer and that a sample he found in the forest was taken by a shady government agency too.

This is one of the least convincing books I have ever read. I understand that an author choosing to write about topics like this shouldn’t get too wrapped up in pandering to sceptics, but there has to be more evidence than this. It really seems like that author’s motivation for writing this book was his desire to write a book about an English bigfoot. He doesn’t seem to have been concerned with making what he says believable.

Again, Cannock Chase covers 26 square miles. The Rocky Mountains, where Sasquatch is supposed to reside, cover well over 38,000 square miles. If you’re going to try to show that there’s a Bigfoot in the former, you’re going to need something more convincing than an Elvis impersonator claiming he saw a hairy face in his window.

UFOs, Werewolves & the Pig-man

This book was writen a few years before the Bigfoot one. It’s a more general look at the reports of odd disturbances at Cannock Chase. It’s easier to accept some of what’s written here as the reported incidents being discussed occurred over a much longer time frame, and they’re not all the about the same thing. None of them are particularly convincing, but they seem less like lies than the Bigfoot claims.

This book features aliens, giant cats and snakes, ghosts, werewolves, demons and underground government tunnels. It almost reads like a proposal for a season of a shitty British version of the X-Files.

“This shit’s about to get really weird.”
Lee Brickley

The above is actually a quote from the book that introduces its most intriguing section, the chapter on the Pig-Man of Cannock Chase. Apparently some twisted scientists during the Second World War were messing with genetic engineering and got a woman pregnant with sperm that had been riddled with pig DNA. She didn’t show any signs of pregnancy for a while, but a year and a half later she gave birth to a half-man, half-pig creature and abandoned her job and family to live with her mutant offspring in the woods. She supposedly died a few years later, but the pig man lived on. The author heard this story from a waiter in a local restaurant.

There is far space in the book given to the pigman’s background story than there is on his sightings. One of the three people who claim to have seen the pigman was a teenager. He claims he was out at night when a naked man who looked a bit like a pig started chasing him. It was probably just Prince Andrew.

Again, nothing in this book was remotely convincing. The author seems to have written it for people who are willing to completely suspend critical thought. I’m sure these books were fun to write, but I honestly can’t imagine anyone taking them seriously.

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.