This is a confusing and stupid book about cryptids and aliens. After starting off with a completely unbelievable yet moderately interesting account of ninja goblins attacking a gang of teenagers in England, the author provides accounts of pretty much every cryptid you can imagine. She covers the Jersey Devil, Mothman, Bigfoot, fairies, lake monsters and lots of aliens. Randle even mentions some of the weird happenings at Cannock Chase. The idea here is that nearly all cryptids and aliens are part of the same phenomena.
Unfortunately, Jenny Randle never provides a clear account of what that phenomena is. She notes that many, if not most, sightings of the unexplained occur near fault lines where the air may be being ionized by chemical changes in the rocks. Also, she notes that most of the people who see these weird creatures are of a similar type. These folks are generally more artistic, psychic and generally imaginative than others. Although she concedes that these sightings are happening in places where the environment is supposedly altering these imaginative people’s consciousnesses, she does not mean to detract from the reality of what these people are seeing.
The reasoning here is ridiculous. The author takes the phenomena of monster sightings and tries to clarify what is happening by saying that it only happens to certain people in certain places. Despite this, she maintains that there is some substantive reality behind these sightings. She’s actually making the issue more complicated rather that clarifying it. According to Randle’s outlook, monster sightings are by their very nature entirely unverifiable.
Honestly, this book was dumb and boring. The only part I found remotely interesting was an account of some cursed stones that really reminded me of the plot of Paul Huson’s The Keepsake.
Final Events and the Secret Government Group on UFOs and the Afterlife – Nick Redfern
Anomalist Books – 2013
Aliens are not extraterrestrials, they are demons that were set loose by Jack Parsons, and they are trying to bring about the end of the world. (They may also be harvesting human souls.) The Collins Elite, a top secret group within the United States government know about this, and they have been working for decades to make sure this doesn’t happen. (Then again, it is possible that all of the information they have been given/putting out has been disinformation. They may unwittingly aid Satan in bringing about the apocalypse.)
There’s some novel details in here, but the basic premise behind this book (that aliens are demons) is one I have encountered a few times before. The most surprising element of Final Events is that its intended audience seems to be conspiracy nuts and fans of Forteana rather than just evangelical Christians (unlike Bob Larson’s UFO book and Basil Tyson’s UFOs Satanic Terror. The problem is that if you don’t believe in Jesus-hating demons, none of this seems remotely convincing. If you’re not a Christian, there’s no real threat being presented, and all of the people claiming that Aliens are Satan’s henchmen just seem like idiots. Redfern doesn’t come across as preachy, but it does feel like he is trying to frighten his Christian readers. I suppose that is a noble thing to do.
I know that the US government has put money into researching bizarre ideas, and I’m sure there’s some military guys who do think that aliens are evil, but this is clearly a book of bullshit. It’s not even a case of misinterpretations either. Most of this was obviously just made up. I’m not saying that Redfern made it up himself, but if he didn’t, his sources definitely did. The guy who put him onto this story was a priest who had been approached by members of the ultra-secretive Collins Elite. I liked the first few chapters, but after a while it got a little boring. Many of the sources it references are absolute tripe too. It discusses both the work of Kurt Koch and Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain. It also mentions last week’s book, the bizarre Round Trip to Hell in a Flying Saucer. Seeing all these titles mentioned alongside the work of my old friends, Whitley Strieber and Aleister Crowley, was fun. It’s nice to know that there are other people out there who spend their time reading this stuff.
Final Events didn’t exactly blow me away, but I enjoyed reading it. I am quite sure that I’ll be reading more books by Nick Redfern in the future. Apparently he has one in which he claims that the alien bodies found at Roswell were actually those of progeria patients. LOL. Definitely checking that one out soon.
A couple of years ago, after I posted about UFOs Satanic Terror, my pal put me on the trail of another book on the same topic called Round Trip to Hell in a Flying Saucer. With a title like that, who could resist? I finally got my hands on a copy yesterday.
Vantage – 1955
Cecil Michael, a mechanic, goes out for a walk and he sees a UFO. A few days later, 2 weird men come into his shop and stand there looking at him. They’re tall, strong, handsome looking men, but they’re weirdly silent and they scare Cecil. He gets really freaked out once they start turning transparent in front of him. They stay in his shop all day, disappearing whenever a customer comes in, and then leave at 4.30. Cecil knows almost immediately that they’re from space. The same thing happens the next day, and the day after that.
These lads are really annoying, and Cecil frequently wants to punch them in their fool faces, but he’s too afraid/in awe of them. Despite that fact that they are capable of speaking telepathically, they say almost nothing to Cecil. At one point they show him their insides. They are made of tubes and electronic parts. They’re a real pair of jackasses.
The spacemen do the same thing every day for a couple of months and then take Cecil for a ride in their spaceship. To do so without inconveniencing Cecil, they create a robot clone of him that stays working in his shop while he’s away. Cecil’s brother ties him to the inside of the spacemen’s flying saucer, and they fly away from Earth and land on a red planet that’s mostly on fire.
When they land, the 2 spacemen stay in the UFO, but Cecil gets off and meets a scruffy bum who tells Cecil that he has a job for him. Cecil doesn’t want the job, so the bum gives him some horrible food and introduces him to his other workers. They are small pygmy men. Their job is to throw corpses into a lake that carries the corpses into a fire. Cecil tells the bum again that he doesn’t want the job, and the bum gets angry with him. Then Jesus appears in the sky. Cecil tells the bum that Jesus will make sure that he doesn’t have to work for him.
The aliens take Cecil back to Earth. After a few more days, they stop showing up in Cecil’s shop because he has been smoking too many cigarettes.
That’s what happens in this book. It’s such a ridiculous story that I find it hard to imagine the author thinking that anyone would believe it. Some of the details are so arbitrary that it reads more like a description of a nightmare than a cohesive narrative. The part where his brother helps him into the spaceship makes no sense. Also, it’s very unclear as to whom the spacemen are working for. Cecil is full of praise for them, but it does seem that they are under the employ of scruffy old Satan. If I was going to make up a story about being kidnapped by spacemen and taken to Hell, I would make the story more cohesive. Maybe this account was just a dream and Cecil Michael thought it was real.
This isn’t like the other Satanic alien books that I’ve read in that it’s not preachy. While Jesus acts as a saviour here, it seems like it’s more a hologram of Jesus than the real guy. This book doesn’t come close to Larson or Tyson’s attempts to use aliens to scare people into Christianity. Round Trip to Hell in a Flying Saucer is a unique and truly bizarre book.
Round Trip To Hell in a Flying Saucer came out first in 1955, but it was republished in 1971 in New Zealand. Copies of these editions are very hard to find, but the complete text was republished in Round Trip To Hell in a Flying Saucer: UFO Parasites – Alien Soul Suckers – Invaders From Demonic Realms Paperback, a 2011 anthology on Satanic aliens compiled by Timothy Green Beckley and Sean Casteel. I may well turn to that book in the future.
Ingo Swann was one of the big names in the development of remote viewing. One of the characters in the movie version of The Men who Stare at Goats is based on him, and he did actually work with the American government on bizarre military projects attempting to harness psychic power.
Penetration: The Question of Extraterrestrial and Human Telepathy – Ingo Swann
Self Published – 1998
This book, published in 1998, tells of how Ingo was approached by a weirdo named “Axelrod” in the early 1970s to work on a top secret project. Axelrod may have been a US government agent, a Russian spy or maybe even an alien. If I remember correctly, Ingo drew Axelrod’s attention by boasting of visiting Jupiter with his mind. Anyways, once he agreed to join the project, Ingo was kidnapped by a weird set of twins (possibly clones or aliens) and taken to a secret location. Then Axelrod gave him some coordinates on the dark side of the moon and Ingo visited them (in his mind). There were aliens up there, and they were able to see Ingo even though his body was actually on Earth. Ingo came back pretty quickly once he had been spotted.
After this, Ingo went home and got back to work. This was the kind of thing that happened to him regularly, and he actually completely forgot about it until he saw a really sexy lady in a grocery store a few years later. He walked closer to her to get a better look at her boobs (really), and then saw the weird twins that had kidnapped him for Axelrod a few years prior. Once he saw them, he realised that the sexy lady was actually an alien, so he ran away.
He was contacted by Axelrod shortly after, and they arranged to meet up again. Axelrod flew him up to Alaska to show him a UFO. The UFO almost killed them with a death-ray, but they hid behind a rock and managed to escape.
The rest of the book presents Swann’s arguments for the moon being an alien spaceship. Ever wonder why we stopped going there in the early 70s? It’s because NASA knows it’s full of aliens. There’s a lot of nonsense about government cover-ups and conspiracies. They don’t want us to know the moon is full of aliens, and they really, really don’t want us to know that we all have psychic powers.
This is stupid garbage. The bullshit story at the beginning was moderately entertaining, but the spew at the end was pure diarrhea. It’s sad to think that there’s twats out there who take this kind of crap seriously. I wouldn’t normally allow myself to read a book about remote viewing, but the cover and title of this one made it hard to resist. Not only does the book fail to keep the promises made by the cover image and titillating title, but it also completely fails to answer the question that makes up the subtitle of the book. The notion of telepathy between extraterrestrials and human is barely touched upon. Swann wrote another book on “psychic sexuality” that I considered reading for a laugh, but I don’t think I’ll bother.
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.
Hilaritas Press – 2019 editions
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.
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
Hummingbird Publishing – 1988
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.
Cool spaceship
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.”
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.
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
Blue Rider Press – 2018
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!
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.
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.
Dealey Plaza. Nov 22, 1963
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.
Nocturnal Revelries 