I wouldn’t consider myself a fan of Elvis Presley. I’ll happily listen to some of his songs, and I understand the role he played in the history of rock music, but it’d be fairly rare that I’d actually put him on. The last time I did so with any regularity was probably back in 2015 when I was reading that book about the housewife who had been conversing with the spirit of Elvis after he died. A couple of weeks back, after reviewing George Piccard’s Liquid Conspiracy, I was looking the through the publisher’s catalogue and saw a book on Elvis that looked pretty interesting.
Elvis is Alive: The Complete Conspiracy – Xaviant Haze
Adventures Unlimited Press – 2015
I’ve known who Elvis was since I was a small child, but in truth, I didn’t really know much about him. This book is basically a biography, and most of the details of Elvis’s life are available from thousands and thousands of other sources. I kept checking his wikipedia page while reading through this book to compare details, and most of it is common knowledge. Below, I have noted down the stuff in this book that I either couldn’t find elsewhere or just had a hard time believing.
Elvis’s manager may have been a former intelligence agent using mind control on Elvis, but there’s no proof of this. This seems unlikely as apparently the guy was also an illegal immigrant who had been kicked out of the army due to psychosis.
The death of Elvis’s mother was brought about by the Illuminati as part of a satanic sacrifice to gain control over Elvis.
When Elvis joined army, he was sent to Germany as a psy-op.
Elvis was a paedophile. He had 14 year old girlfriend when he was 24. The book doesn’t labour this point, but it’s true. I didn’t know this. Yuck.
Elvis was a drug expert and a karate master capable of slowing his heart rate., so he could have easily faked his own death. Had plenty of reasons to want to escape his life.
The postmortem report may have been written by Elvis himself. It had inaccurate details.
There was a black helicopter spotted over Elvis’s house the day he died.
Elvis’s coffin was 900lbs. Why so heavy? Because it probably contained a wax figure rather than a corpse and so must have had an inbuilt refrigeration system to stop the wax from melting. (This makes no sense.)
Elvis was a healer and had telekinetic powers. He could make bushes move with his mind.
Elvis saw multiple UFOs. These may have had something to do with the weird blue light that appeared in the sky on the night he was born.
Michael Jackson married Elvis’s daughter, possibly in the hopes of learning details on how Elvis faked his own death.
The Illuminati tried to kill MJ after he released “They don’t really care about us”.
There’s literally no convincing evidence in this book that suggests that Elvis Presley is anything but dead. If you wanted to read a biography of Elvis, his wikipedia page would be a more reliable choice. This book is pointless. It exists to exist rather than to prove a point. Half of it is about Michael Jackson, another filthy creep. Him and Elvis were two paedos in a pod. Good riddance to the pair of dirty cunts.
I’m fairly skeptical about most of the crap I post about, but I have always had a belief in UFOs. I think that denying that there are unidentified things in the sky is very stupid. I don’t necessarily believe that these things are piloted by ET, but I know that they exist. The pentagon released footage of some of these things just a couple of days ago, and I think that anyone who has watched that footage will agree it’s pretty weird stuff.
Imminent – Luis Elizondo
Harper Collins – 2024
I had no idea that footage was coming out, but I started Luis Elizondo’s Imminent last week. I don’t pay a huge amount of attention to modern UFO disclosures, but I was vaguely aware of a movement a few years ago involving the singer from Blink 182, the footage of the tic-tac UFOs and that Grusch guy. All of these elements make up part of Elizondo’s story.
So Elizondo was a military guy with high security clearance. He ended up in charge of a secret division of the US government that was investigating UFOs. He became so convinced that UFOs could be a threat to the USA that he quit his job and went public with some of what he knew. This book is the story of how that all happened.
The problem with the book is that it doesn’t really offer anything of substance. These are the same claims I’ve read a hundred times before. There may be bodies, but we don’t know where they are. To make matters worse, Elizondo claims to have been part of the American Government’s program to teach soldiers remote viewing. He also mentions his admiration for Ingo Swann and Robert Bigelow, the dude who funded all the bullshit research at Skinwalker Ranch. Honestly, after reading how he believed in using his imagination to fly around the Earth, I found it very difficult to take any of his claims seriously.
Apparently Elizondo has a new book coming out soon. I doubt I’ll bother reading it. This was crap.
Liquid Conspiracy: JFK, LSD, the CIA, Area 51 & UFOs – George Piccard
I bought this based on its title a few weeks ago. It turned out to be exactly what I expected it to be, an attempt to tie every conspiracy theory together. I think that lots of conspiracy theories have roots in real conspiracies, but ascribing responsibility for every shady cover-up to one group is ridiculous. It’s much easier for me to believe that the world is riddled with shady organisations who are competing for power than to believe that there is one shady organisation running the whole show.
Piccard’s main idea is that there’s a group of elites who are running the “liquid conspiracy”. It’s called the “liquid conspiracy” because like liquid, it is constantly changing shape. By constantly changing their plans, this group is able to conceal their identities and goals. This is a stupid idea that makes the author seem like an idiot. Here’s a chapter by chapter breakdown:
Intro Kilder, a clerk at GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters), had access to top level security files. He also had a photographic memory, so he remembered everything. There is a secret group controlling the world. He spent years trying to get this info out after JFK got killed, but nobody listened. When he was dying of cancer, the UN sent a Black Ops division to kill him, so he got into email contact with Piccard. Piccard swore to hold off on publishing the information until Kilder was dead. This is pretty funny as it’s very similar to the framing narrative of the Report from Iron Mountain, a work of satire that has profoundly influenced most conspiracy theories since the late 60s. An informant who worked for a top secret division of the government contacts a journalist with classified information before disappearing. The fact that Leonard C. Lewin, the recipient of the Iron Mountain document, was a satirist seems to have gone over many of his readers’ heads. I haven’t been able to find any information Mr. Piccard online. He wrote this piece of crap and later contributed to another book on the Holy Lance. It seems odd that anyone would have sought him out to present him with the top secret information that is revealed in this book.
Chapter 1. The Knights Templar discovered that the real Jesus hated the god of the Old Testament and thought he was the devil. They set out to find the original gospels but were suppressed by the church for fear of a power struggle. A group, suspiciously referred to as “the Elders” a group of Rothschilds and Freemasons, started the Illuminati to take over the world with poisonous democracy. They killed Abe Lincoln. There’s a few curious mentions of an Illuminati document called “New Testament of Satan” by Weishaupt. I should track this down. World War 2 was essentially a front for a battle between the remaining Templars (the Knights of Malta) and the “Elders”, but everythjng got a bit mixed up and some of the parties involved were infiltrated by both groups. It was at that point that I realised that Piccard wasn’t overly concerned with cohesion. What he’s saying doesn’t make sense, so he basically accuses the Nazis of being on both sides of his secret war. Also, Hitler may have escaped into the Hollow Earth. Piccard ends the chapter by suggesting that the Elders, the Templars and the grey aliens finally ended their rivalry and came together to come up with a plan for world domination.
Chapter 2. The Nazis had access to extraterrestrial technology. It is unclear as how they got it. Either they found a UFO or the secrets of Vril and implosive (divine) energy had been passed through countless generations of Thuleans. They built and used several flying saucers.
Chapter 3. The real reason that Nazi scientists were brought to America was because America was being run by the “Elders” who wanted to control the German’s knowledge of Vril. It is likely that many Nazis avoided having to go to America by either going to South America or into the Hollow Earth through a tunnel in Antarctica. Towards the end of WW2, Allen Dulles, head of the CIA made a deal with Hitler promising to absorb remaining Nazi officers into the US intelligence community. Dulles of course was not really a Nazi. He was working for the “Elders”.
Chapter 4. Short chapter. Author quotes from The Protocals of the Elders, but doesn’t mention Zion. He’s essentially confirming that the Elders he’s been speaking about are the same “elders” we’ve suspected all along. The Illuminati use mind control. Nazis and Stalin were obstacles to the Illuminati. I’m not sure who the bad guys are supposed to be.
Chapter 5. The US Government may have been doing LSD experiments for longer than admitted. It’s pretty well known now that CIA did do LSD experiments, so this doesn’t seem like much of a stretch. It is again suggested that Allan Dulles, the head of the CIA may have collaborated with Nazis.
Chapter 6. This chapter is on MKULTRA and other CIA mind control experiments. It’s difficult to distinguish between the facts and bullshit here as it is well established that MKULTRA did happen and was so fucked up that the CIA deliberately hid as much of it as they could. This chapter discusses the Frank Olsen case, an experiment involving the CIA, prostitutes and LSD that I think I read about in CHAOS, that Manson book, and testimony from a person who was experimented on as a child that reads like an episode of Stranger Things.
Chapter 7. The author discusses the Maury Island incident. Fred Crisman comes up. Then there’s an explanation of Roswell. It was an alien ship crashed by humans. It had been gifted to us by the Marcabs. Microwave technology and fiber optics were both also gifts from aliens.
Chapter 8. Discussion on Area 51 and Hangar 18. Both defintiely house aliens. Also, the American government and the Nazis they imported after WW2 had a program where they abducted 75,000 US children every year to turn into mind controlled slaves.
Chapter 9. The Dulce Base is underground base which houses thousands of alien human hybrids. Sometimes they get out and run amok. Some are reptilian, some are hairy. The reptilian ones may be the descendants of dinosaurs who entered the Hollow Earth through the hole in Antarctica hundreds of millions of years ago. This sounds too mental to be true, and it could be disinformation, but there’s no reason to believe that anything less crazy is actually happening.
Chapter 10. It wasn’t Lee Harvey Oswald who killed Kennedy. We’re not sure who it was, but it wasn’t him. There were people talking about it before it happened, and others confessed. It wasn’t Oswald.
Chapter 11. Marilyn Monroe was actually murdered because the FBI were afraid she would confess to public that JFK had taken her to Area 51 and showed her an alien. JFK’s next lover, Mary Pinchot Meyer used to score cocaine and LSD for him.
Chapter 12. Sirhan Sirhan (RFK), Hinckley (Reagan) and Chapman (Lennon) were all mind control victims of the CIA. I’m struggling to keep hold of the thread that ties this book together. Any of the ideas in here are cool by themselves, but there’s no real effort to fit them together in a cohesive way. This book is just paranoid ramblings.
Chapter 13. Cults are all part of the plan. Jonestown was a CIA orchestrated event possibly coordinated by Josef Mengele. The People’s Temple was also the CIA. The Davidians were chill, but the FBI killed them. (Apart from the Mengele part, none of this would be truly shocking.)
Chapter 14. Ohio became a state later than other US states, and because President Taft was born there when it wasn’t yet a state, any laws he signed into law are obsolete. By the way, he’s the one who introduced income tax. Weird cryptids that originated in genetic experiments have made weird shelters out of wood to give birth in. Ohio is full of monsters like the Loveland creature.
Chapter 15. AIDs is a man made disease to reduce black population
Chapter 16. EU identification cards contain a barcode and the number 666. Someday we’ll all have an implant chip. This is another conspiracy book from the 90s in which the author’s predictions of a dystopian future fall far short of what has actually happened. This chapter also details on black helicopters, HAARP, chemtrails, and fluoride in drinking water.
Epilogue Unlike the black helicopter books i read recently, this book ends on a downer. The author warns that the New World Order is coming no matter what and there’s nothing we can do to stop it except praying. It’s pretty easy to threaten this when the description of the “Liquid Conspiracists” that he’s warning of is so vague that identifying them is essentially impossible.
This book is total crap, but it’s exactly the kind of thing I’ll deliberately leave out on the coffee table the next time my in-laws are paying a visit.
I’ve read 2 Nick Redfern books in the last year. The first was about evil aliens and the end of the world, and the second was about progeria patients flying UFOs. Nothing I have read by this man has made me think he is a trustworthy source. Nevertheless, I recently read another of his books, Bloodline of the Gods. I can safely say that this one was much, much sillier than the other two. This is presented as non-fiction, but its connection with reality is so tenuous that it is impossible to take seriously. I read plenty of wacky books, but this one doesn’t even try to be convincing. It’s just a series of ifs.
Bloodline of the Gods: Unravel the Mystery of the Human Blood Type to Reveal the Aliens Among Us
Weiser – 2015
A long time ago, the Annunaki aliens came down to Earth to harvest our gold so that they could take it back to their planet to pump it into their atmosphere to prevent the greenhouse effect from destroying their planet. When they got here, they realised that it was going to take a long time to export all of our gold, so they spliced their DNA with that of the neanderthals to create a hybrid race that would continue harvesting Earth’s gold. These hybrids were slightly unruly, and so some of the Annunaki stayed behind to make sure they were behaving themselves. These are the reptilians. The proof of this story is the fact that many alien abductees have RH negative blood.
Redfern gets into more detail, but the whole thing is so ridiculous that I’m not going to bother getting into particulars. This is clearly a steaming pile of horseshit that the author himself doesn’t believe.
Unlike other authors who write multiple books about aliens, Redfern doesn’t build on what he was already written. All three of the books I have read by him present different, incompatible accounts of what’s going on with UFO sightings and alien abductions. Aliens may well be evil demons, disabled Japanese people or shapelifting lizards, but surely they can’t be all of those things at once.
Honestly, this book was so stupid that I considered giving up after a few chapters. Part of what convinced me to plow through and finish this was the fact that I had an audiobook version that I could listen to while cleaning the dishes. There’s a part in the book where Redfern uses the word “ass”, but the audiobook narrator is British and pronounces it as “arse”. This one quote made the entire experience worthwhile.
It was one thing to get nabbed by aliens, taken on-board their craft, and hosed down like a muddy, old car. It was quite another to get rewarded after that traumatic experience with a fine and tasty piece of extraterrestrial arse.
Bloodline of the Gods is Teletubbies, use your imagination crap. You’d have to be a ham sandwich to take this stuff seriously. I don’t think I’ll bother with any more Redfern for a while.
I first came across the name Jim Brandon when i was researching James Shelby Downard last year. Brandon was the guy who was interviewing Downard on the Sirius Rising recording that resulted in Robert Anton Wilson describing Downard’s ideas as the “the most absurd, the most incredible, the most ridiculous Illuminati theory of them all”. A little research on Brandon told me that wrote two books on Fortean phenomena, Weird America and The Rebirth of Pan but that most of his literary output was neo Nazi material that came out under the name William Grimstad.
Now I don’t have any interest in promoting the beliefs of neo-Nazis, but I do like reading weird stuff, and what I had read about Brandon sounded truly bizarre. After glancing through Weird America, I decided to skip it. It’s basically a list of places in America where Fortean phenomena have been witnessed. It might be useful as a reference book, but the thought of reading it cover to cover seemed pretty boring. I decided to focus instead on his The Rebirth of Pan. A book that claims that the great God Pan, a great and powerful Earth spirit is alive and dedicated to causing mischief in North America.
The Rebirth of Pan: Hidden Faces of the American Earth Spirt
Firebird Press – 1983
This is definitely among the weirdest books I have read. Its central claim, that science has become too rigid to meaningfully account for every known phenomena, is one I have encountered many times before, but the reasons given here to believe this claim are definitely more far-fetched than the usual stuff. I’ll give a brief summary of each chapter, or at least what I got out of each chapter.
Chapter 1 Bigfeet appear near horny people and menstruating. Aleister Crowley and Kenneth Grant point out that sex can be used to bring about bizarre magical entities. This would explain why we can’t catch bigfeet the way we catch other wild animals. Instead of luring our traps with meat, we should use a shagging couple.
Chapter 2 North America is covered in mounds. We don’t know who made these or how. Traditional archaeologists have suggested it was prehistoric Native Americans, but the author seems to believe that it was more likely a race of giants and a race of cannibal pygmies who were responsible.
Chapter 3 This chapter is a discussion of a bunch of artifacts that have shown up in America with text on them. Many claim these were from Native Americans, but others point out the similarities between this writing and Hebrew, Norse and Chinese. Most of these artifacts were dismissed as hoaxes, but author dismisses this notion because one hoax is unlikely but more than one is even more unlikely. This chapter is a bit confusing because Brandon includes both sides of the discussion, and it’s not until the end that he tells you what he actually thinks. He doesn’t think these artifacts come from native Americans or pre-Columbian visitors to North America. He thinks they’re from bigfoot. Now bigfoot here is a transdimensional entity, the kind encountered in The Psychic Sasquatch and some other book I’ve read recently that I can’t quite remember. (Maybe John Keel?) The writing on these artifacts is Norse, Chinese, and Latin, or some combination thereof. Whatever entity left these artifacts came from another time or dimension and they didn’t know which language the locals used, so they wrote in the one they were most familiar with. This is definitely the least unlikely possibility.
Chapter 4 Fossils that feature well preserved lifeforms may not be what scientists say they are. How do we know that these aren’t just rocks that are actually giving birth to these creatures? The author claims that idea that life comes from rocks is much better than the theory of evolution. Proof of this idea is found in the fact that bigfoot often makes piles of rocks and throws rocks at people to attack them. Weird stuff often happens near water, but more interestingly, weird stuff (tornadoes, bigfoot sightings, random explosions) frequently happen to trailer parks. The author suggests that this is probably because as metal containers, trailers are more likely to trap mysterious orgone energy, but it seems more likely to me that they’re more susceptible to tornado damage because they’re not anchored to the ground and more susceptible to bigfoot attacks because the people living in them are poor and probably uneducated (and hence more delicious to predators). It turns out that many of the strange structures and rocks dotted across America were made by Pan, the Earth spirit.
Chapter 5 More of the same, but this time he looks at how the measurements of some of these structures can be manipulated so that they relate to the measurements of the pyramids at Giza. Some of the structures he discusses here are from a book called Traditions of De Coo Dah by William Pidgeon, a book that has been accepted as a hoax for over a century. Brandon claims that the reason nobody has ever seen the monuments described by Pidgeon is that Pan caused the Earth to swallow them up in a reversal of the way he created many of the mysterious mounds previously discussed.
Chapter 6 Some numbers 23 and 33 are linked with countless weird events. Some names are too. Author lists off bad things that have happened in places called Lafayette or Fayette. These include cryptid sightings, the murders of presidents and prophets and more. He also points out that the Amityville murderer‘s name was Defeo (de-fay-oh), and Aleister Crowley’s mantra of, “do what thou wilt” translated into latin is, “fay que ce voudras”.
Chapter 7 The last chapter is basically a long conclusion that adds little to the author’s claims. It talks about symbolism and alchemy and Sirius. The nost intersting claim here is that some aliens, probably those from Orion, hate dogs because of the link between dogs and Sirius. The aliens from Sirius and Orion supposedly hate eachother according to some alien contactees. Bigfeet also hate dogs, so maybe they are aliens?
Appendices Only point of interest here is the suggestion that cattle mutialtions are done by bigfoot.
Overall, this book was a boring slog. It had some truly ridiculous ideas, but the reasoning is just too weak for it to be taken seriously at all. I love the idea of reading a book that references the works of Aleister Crowley, H.P. Lovecraft, Kenneth Grant, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Montague Summers, and Robert Anton Wilson, but there was no real cohesion to this jumbling mess. It’s not surprising that the author is a dumb piece of trash.
Chainsaw Terror is soon to be rereleased, but a few years ago, the only way to read it without paying a fortune was to buy the Shaun Hutson omnibus containing Come the Night (the alternate title for Chainsaw Terror) and the 2 sequels that Hutson wrote to Clive Harold’s The Uninvited. Seeing as though I already had 2 of the 3 books on my shelf, I decided to give this trilogy a read.
The Uninvited – Clive Harold
Star – 1983 (Originally published 1979)
Clive Harold’s The Uninvited is about a farming family in Wales being disturbed by aliens. They see spaceships that stop their cars from driving, they get a rash, their cows disappear and reappear, they see spacemen in shiny suits, and weird men with waxy foreheads call at their neighbour’s house to ask questions about them. It’s pretty straightforward stuff as far as these things go, and no explanation other than aliens from spaceships is considered.
There were a couple of passages in the book that made me think of how horrible it would be to experience this kind of thing, but I didn’t find any of it convincing. I have seen pictures online of the family this book is about, so it is possible that there was at least some factual basis for this story. I reckon they were bullshitters though.
The book was published in the late 70s, and when I looked up the author, the only thing I could find about his life after publishing this book was that he ended up homeless and selling the Big Issue in the 1990s.
My favourite thing about this book was the amount of tea and coffee the family drink. It genuinely made me care about their wellbeing. Imagine having your evening swally of tae ruined by a disappearing herd of cows. Nightmarish.
The Uninvited 2: The Visitation – Frank Taylor
Star – 1984
This one is about a family who own a pub who get harrassed by aliens. The aliens abduct and rape the mother and send down Men in Black to annoy the family. I was hoping this was going to be like the first book but Shaun Hutsoned, but it’s very similar in its scope. There’s no mutant abortions, IRA men or chainsaws. Although it is suggested that the women are raped, it cuts out after they feel their legs being spread open. This is boring crap, and I sincerely doubt any of it is true.
The Uninvited 3: The Abduction – Frank Taylor
Star – 1985
This time it’s a policeman who sees an alien, but his coworkers don’t believe him. He gets a heat rash after being chased by a spaceship, and 2 aliens try to come into his house. Men in Black show up to tell him to keep things to himself, but these are members of the government rather than aliens Eventually the copper is abducted and raped by a sexy alien woman with red pubic hair. This was boring, definitely fictional garbage. It’s half-assed, and I am not surprised that Shaun Hutson used a pseudonym.
The Uninvited – Nick Pope
Pocket Books – 1998
I’ve been listening to a lot of audiobooks recently, and the reason I read the three above books was because I downloaded an audiobook called The Uninvited thinking it was the first book in the series. It turns out it was actually a completely different book about aliens by a researcher named Nick Pope. I was a few chapters in before realising that it was something totally different, but at that stage I had gone too far to turn back.
This is a fairly broad overview of the alien abduction phenomenon. It covers many of the most famous abduction cases and some cases that the author came across when working as a UFO specialist for the British Ministry of Defence. I found the stuff on the older cases quite interesting, but Pope’s willingness to accept obvious nonsense was a bit jarring. A lot of the people he’s talking about were clearly liars or morons, and some of the cases he discusses have long been accepted as hoaxes. Here is a video of him interviewing an alien who has possessed a woman that Pope claims holds the world record for number of times to get abducted. There’s a whole chapter in this book about her.
On a separate note, I found out yesterday that my friend Sandy Robertson died. I first encountered Sandy when he scolded me for pretending to throw my Colin Wilson books in the garbage. We became friends after I interviewed him about his Aleister Crowley book, and I heard from him nearly every week after that. He was a really cool guy, and I was deeply saddened to hear that he passed. Sandy my friend, if your ghost is reading this (and I wouldn’t be surprised if it is), I will miss you.
After a decade of running this blog, I have encountered most of the leading figures and concepts in the realms of conspiracy theories, occultism and the UFO phenomenon. When I found this short book that seeks to organise all of these elements into a cohesive narrative, I started reading it immediately.
Illuminet Press – 1999
The alien abduction phenomena may well be a psyop perpetrated against the citizens of the world by a secret society that maintains control of many major government institutions. They are doing this as part of an occult ritual to maintain their control. They may possibly be doing so with the aid of actual extraterrestrials. It is also possible that the extraterrestrials that they are dealing with are actually demons. The Illuminati have had so much disinformation spread about this stuff that it’s basically impossible to know what is real and what isn’t. (Disney’s The Lion King is actually a movie about the coming Messiah.)
This book was ridiculous nonsense. I mean, that seems pretty obvious, and anyone expecting anything else from a book with this title would have to be buffoon. I didn’t expect to walk away convinced of anything when I started this, but I had hoped to be more entertained.
Jim Keith tries to synthesize ideas from the writings of Aleister Crowley, Kenneth Grant, Michael A. Hoffman II, Philip K. Dick, Robert K.G. Temple, the Holy Blood, Holy Grail guys and James Shelby Downard. The above authors are legitimately some of the loopiest nut jobs around, and while it’s fun to try to see similarities and connections in their work, the resulting narrative is so ridiculous that it’s barely worth reading. The freemasons killed JFK with mind-controlled assassins as a sacrifice to their Satanic alien accomplices. Parts of the proof of this idea are the ramblings of a science fiction author who was going through a nervous breakdown and the religious beliefs of a remote tribe in Africa.
This is the third book by Jim Keith that I’ve read in the last few months. He also compiled The Gemstone File and Secret and Suppressed, but he actually wrote Saucers of the Illuminati by himself. I get the impression that it’s the most out there of all of his books. There was some interesting ideas in here, and it gave me the names of a few other weird texts to find, but there’s too much going on in here for it to be even remotely convincing. I reckon I’ll give Keith’s other books a look at some point in the future.
I would imagine that I have read more books on aliens than most sensible people, but in truth, I have only scratched the surface of UFO literature. Within ufology, there are texts that get mentioned again and again, and there are certain cases that many UFO writers expect their readers to be familiar with. One of the foundational texts of the field (maybe because of its role in John Keel’s Mothman Prophecies, another classic) is Woodrow Derenberger’s Visitors from Lanulos.
Originally published 1971
In truth, it has been many a twelvemonth since I read Keel’s Mothman book, but one of the things I do remember from it was the name Indrid Cold. Indrid Cold was a spaceman from a planet called Lanulos. He appeared and spoke telepathically to a salesman named Woodrow Derenberger when Woody was driving one night. After this Woody’s life changed forever. This book tells Woody’s story.
The first half of the book describes Woody’s encounters with Indrid Cold and his alien buddies and their trips around the universe in the spacemen’s spaceship. The latter half is mostly rants about how the government can’t be trusted because they are covering up the existence of our benevolent space brothers. Here’s my summary:
Ch.1 Woody meets an alien on the road and has a telepathic chat. The alien is nice. Woody tells his mates and becomes famous. Ch. 2 NASA won’t disclose their alien info to public in case it causes a wave of suicide and women throwing their babies in front of trains. Ch. 3 Indrid Cold and his buddy show up on the author’s doorstep and tell him about their world’s religion. They have no wars because they communicate telepathically and everyone loves everyone. Humans can learn telepathy too. The author can talk telepathically with 2 of his mates. Ch. 4 Woody goes for a ride on a spaceship. They go to the Amazon, then Saturn and then Indrid’s mother ship. Woody meets lots of nice people there and eats alien potatoes. They take him to their planet but don’t let him get off because he’s not immunized. They tell him that they can let him live on Mars or Venus if he wants. It’s strange to me that these aliens are just men. Ch. 5-7 Woody goes back to Lanulos and goes to Indrid’s home and meets his kids. Indrid has a daughter who was born shortly after Christmas. How that makes any sense to an alien is confusing. Woody goes out for a walk. The streets have built in escalators like at the airport. All the aliens are nude, and when Woody takes his clothes off to fit in, they stare at him because they have never seen a fat person before. Their existence is paradise. These aliens from a different planet eat beef and drink coffee. They don’t have sex outside of marriage. They are Christians and believe they will be with jesus when they die. A bit odd… Ch. 8 Woody tells of the humanoids, a different race of aliens who like to steal things from people. Indrid Cold and his buddies chase these pesky (although not malicious) aliens out of the universe for annoying woody. Ch. 9 Another alien takes Woody for a spaceship ride around the world. Their first stop is Iraq. Ch. 10 Woody recounts some amusing events including the time that John Keel fell into a cowpat in his garden and having to deal with a rumour that the aliens had impregnated him. Ch. 11 Woody describes the alien’s relationship with his family. His wife and kids were initially terrified, but once Indrid and his buddy dressed up as salesmen and tricked his wife into letting them into her home, she came to trust them… Woody boasts how he would get the space people to track his wife when she left the house alone. Quite a creepy thing to think about. Was he just following her himself and gaslighting her for fun? Ch. 12 Woody goes to Venus. It is covered in vegetation and rivers and lakes. It’s always 100 degrees there. (It’s actually usually over 800 degrees and has no water.) Ch. 13 Woody and his wife go to a party with a bunch of other freaks who constantly see spaceships. Unsurprisingly some aliens come to spy on them but run away when the partygoers start making spaceship noises. Ch. 14 A few stories from other contactees including a mentally ill housewife who was cured of her neuroses on a trip to Lanulos and a doctor who gets telepathic advise from a Martian doctor on how to treat his patients. At one point aliens broke into this doctors house and scared his children when he wasn’t home. Ch. 15 A race of dwarfs from the planet Jammu come to Earth and take blood samples from people under the orders of a dwarf named “Marma”. Men in Black are members of government agencies who want to maintain the status quo. Ch. 16 The Government knows all about the aliens, but they keep it secret for control. They are liars. At this point the book is taking a very conspiratorial turn. Ch. 17 Details a bunch of UFO sightings Ch. 18 Men in Black call Woody and his family. There are no bad aliens visiting Earth because bad aliens wouldn’t be able to get a flight license from the Intergalactic Federation. Ch. 19 Some more UFO reports Ch. 20 The government know everything and are keeping it all a secret. Ch. 21 Government scientists can’t be trusted. The military have alien crafts, but these weren’t from crashes or shot down. The aliens gave them to the military.
Obviously, the whole book is a bunch of nonsense. The visits to Lanulos were only marginally less ridiclous than Cecil Michael’s Round Trip to Hell in a Flying Saucer. I know that John Keel had a reputation for being willing to twist facts to suit his narrative, but it’s hard to believe that any sensible person would give any credence to Derenberger’s insane ramblings. This is cuckoo- crazy rubbish. Much of the attention paid to this book nowadays comes from Derenberger’s description of Indrid Cold’s creepy smile, but I don’t recall that being mentioned in the book, and if it is, it must have been a brief mention. The only part about Indrid’s face that I can find is where in the first chapter it says his expression changed sometimes. Maybe Derenberger did mention it, but it seems that the internet has really blown that tiny detail out of proportion. According to Woody, ol’ Indrid was a super-genuine, nice fellow.
The crash at Roswell is surely the most infamous UFO incident of all time. The story goes that a spaceship full of aliens crashed on a ranch and the government recovered parts of the craft and its pilots’ corpses. Much of the controversy and allegations of a cover-up stem from the government’s own initial reports that they had recovered a flying disc. Days later they claimed it had been a weather balloons.
Gallery Books – 2005
During the summer, I read a book by Nick Redfern in which he claims that Satanic aliens are in league with the US government, so I was a little surprised to find that his book, Body Snatchers in the Desert, claims that the government didn’t find any aliens at Roswell. No, here he claims that much of the UFO lore that has been spread over the last 75 years has been government disinformation. The reality of what crashed in Roswell is much more sinister than a gang of unlucky instellar adventurers.
The crash at Roswell was actually an experimental nuclear aircraft that was piloted by a team of physically and mentally disabled people that the American government had retrieved from Japan’s infamous Unit 731 in China. Unit 731 was the Japanese equivalent to Nazi concentration camps in terms of the scientific experiments performed on human beings. Supposedly the American government gave the scientists working there a choice. They could either be executed for crimes against humanity, or they could come and work in the USA. After they joined Team America, the scientists and their remaining test subjects were covertly brought to the US and set to work on calculating how much radiation a person could be subjected to.
During this work, there was a mishap with an experimental airship that was being piloted by a group of disabled people, and when the government realised how bad this would look, they deliberately spread disinformation about aliens because that would cause them less trouble. Redfern accepts the testimony of the soldiers who saw the alien corpses, but insists that these were merely Asian people who had progeria.
This is so revolting an idea that it’s hard not to laugh. At the same time, it is a more believable explanation to the Roswell story than aliens. The United States government did perform radiation experiments on disabled people at this time, and it did harbour international criminals for its own benefit after the second world war. It also definitely spread misinformation to its own people and agencies. Most of the elements of Redfern’s story are based in fact, and it’s only when they’re put together that they become hard to swallow.
Redfern wrote a follow up to this book a few years ago, but I don’t think I’ll bother with it. The actual message of Body Snatchers in the Desert can be summed up as above, but most of the book is made up of testimony from mysterious insiders. Redfern provides some legitimate looking documentation, but it’s impossible to judge how trustworthy this kind of material is. If the US government was spreading disinformation, I would assume that they would not only cover their tracks by not documenting certain things, but they would also do their best to obfuscate any other information on the topic. Nothing proves anything when it comes to stuff like this, and you can never tell who is lying and what is true. (Not lying doesn’t mean true!) Redfern’s premise sounds like conspiracy theory nonsense, and while I don’t necessarily buy his story, I wouldn’t put it past those bastards at the Pentagon!
I’ve been having a busy time juggling work, family and studying recently, and I’m struggling to find time to read for entertainment. Audiobooks are ideal for my current situation, but I find it difficult to find free non-fiction audiobooks that are even slightly relevant to my interests. When I found an audiobook copy of Keel’s 1971 book Our Haunted Planet, I thought I’d give it a go.
Futura – 1975 (Originally published 1971)
The only other book I’ve read by Keel was The Mothman Prophecies, and this is a far less focused book than that one. There’s a lot of stuff about UFOs, ancient archaeology, and most other Fortean phenomenon in here. The main idea is that there were civilisations on Earth before humans evolved. This was entertaining enough to listen to while I washed the dishes, but the stuff in here that I’ve encountered before is so ludicrous that it was hard to take any of the other information seriously. This is very much in the same vein as Pauwels and Bergier’s Morning of the Magicians and that kind of crap.
Very few of the ideas in this book have any basis in reality. Our Haunted Planet is more than 50 years old at this point, and the immediate availability of more accurate information on the internet renders it obsolete. I can only recommend reading this if you want to understand what people on the fringes of thought were into half a century ago. I do quite enjoy thinking about that, and I will probably read more Keel in the future.
Normally I only post on Sundays, but I have a seasonal post lined up for Thursday. Check back then if you’re interested!
Nocturnal Revelries 