The US government killed a bunch of pop stars because they were afraid of the influence these people wielded over their fans. Those targeted include Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, John Lennon, Bob Marley and Michael Hutchence.
That’s the central premise of this book. It’s remarkably unconvincing. I don’t even want to get into the reasons not to believe this crap. Were there curious aspects to the deaths of these musicians? Yeah. Is it possible that the “offical” accounts don’t paint an accurate picture of what happened? Of course! But that doesn’t mean the government killed them. They were drug-addled degenerates for goodness’ sake! Morrison was past the peak of his fame when he died and had been using hard drugs for years. Brian Jones had been kicked out the Rolling Stones when he died. Michael Hutchence was never popular or powerful enough to warrant a government assassination. I’d wager that more people think of him as the hanging wank guy than anything else these days. I really don’t think the government gave a shit about any of these artists.
For the record, I’m not saying I don’t think the government would kill an irritating public figure. (They obviously murdered Charlie Kirk…) It’s just that the reasons presented in this book don’t convince me that they killed any of these lads.
Aside from being unconvincing, this book is also painfully boring. There’s very little context given to many of the events described here, and the author seems to think that lists of facts will be sufficient to engage the reader. There are parts in the book where he goes off on tangents portaying minor characters as shady inviduals, but these tangents do little more than make it more difficult to follow the narrative he’s trying to sell. There are so many names in here that it’s genuinely quite tricky to remember who is who.
Books about conspiracies can be worth reading even if they are boring. If the material is convincing, then the facts speak for themselves. On the other hand, a book of easily dismissed conspiracy theories could still be very enjoyable if it was well written. Unfortunately, The Covert War Against Rock is both boring and unconvincing, and this is an unforgivable combination. Reading this drivel was a waste of my time.
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’d been planning to read Jim Keith’s Black Helicopters books for a while. The black helicopters conspiracy is a little dull in some ways, but it seems integral enough to conspiracy lore that I had to take a closer look. The general idea is that right wing militia types thought that unmarked black helicopters were swarming around America trying to suppress American patriots. These helicopters were piloted by emissaries of the New World Order, nameless/faceless individuals working for some shady, secretive division of the government focused on overthrowing the government.
Oh, by the way, I’ve cracked the code I’ve figured out these shadow organizations And the Illuminati know That they’re finally primed for world domination
And soon you’ve got black helicopters comin’ cross the border Puppet masters for the New World Order Be aware: There’s always someone that’s watching you.
The first book gives a timeline of black helicopter sightings. The confusing thing here is that for the first 20 or so years of these sightings, they were linked, almost exclusively, with cattle mutilations. It was only after 1993 that the helicopters became linked with the idea of political oppression. This switch seems confusing at first, but it’s easily explained away. The globalists spent 20 years having their henchmen cut up some cows to throw people off their trail. It seems kind of mad when you think about it first, but look at the wacky shit they pumped into the Kennedy assassination narrative. That the American government would push ridiculous disinformation to cover their tracks is the least unlikely part of this conspiracy theory.
Much of the rest of the books is extremely boring and unconvincing. Both discuss FEMA camps (a discredited idea about giant underground prisons covered extensively in Bill Cooper’s book). There’s also a bizarre section in the second book on the “quadrant sign code”. This is a theory that claims that the stickers placed on the back of traffic signs across America were actually placed in such a manner that they provided directions to different mystery locations to mystery employees of secret groups within the government. The person writing about this theory had not cracked the code, and hence had no actual evidence of his claims, but this didn’t stop him from waffling on for 17 pages. Overall, the second book is considerably worse. The first book isn’t hugely entertaining, but the ideas it was discussing were novel enough for me to enjoy it for a few hours. Also, the first volume covers roughly 25 years of sightings over its 150 pages. The second book covers 3 years of new information over the course of 220 pages, so it’s a bit more drawn out and dull.
I’m sure many people who read these books in the 1990s probably rolled their eyes at many of the claims herein. I probably would have too. It’s very easy to be dismissive of conspiracy theories, and there’s always people out there who are crazier than you. I’ve seen writing from Jim Keith, the author of this book, dismissing the claims of Bill Cooper and David Icke. I’m clearly skeptical of some of the claims made by Keith, but I have the benefit of hindsight and the internet. Looking back at what these guys were afraid of now is bizarre. Some of their fears were misguided, but many of them fell far short of how bad things would actually get. Keith is afraid of microchipping and government control over the lives of private citizens. Now the majority of people in America are glued to a cellphone that includes a camera, a microphone and GPS tracking. We routinely and willingly tell these phones things we wouldn’t tell another human being. Mega-corporations like google and meta know more about us than our closest friends and family members. Social media is a more efficient control of mind control than 90s conspiracy theorists could have imagined. It’s not UN soldiers who are murdering American citizens, it’s their own law enforcement agencies, and it’s not the globalists who’ve taken over, but billionaire child-molesting, bloodthirsty creeps, insidious scumbags who went out of their way to convince people like Keith’s patriotic readers that they were right while simultaneously using their fears as a playbook on how to seize control. I sincerely wish Jim Keith had been right. The New World Order sounds a whole lot better than the mess we have today.
When I was a boy, one of the great privileges of being the oldest child in the family was being allowed to stay up to watch the first half of the Late Late Show on a Friday night. At this point we only had 8 TV stations, and most households in Ireland tuned in to watch Gay Byrne’s long running chat show. I would have watched every Saturday for a few years, but I only have memories of 2 specific episodes. One was an interview with Rael (who was on the show a few times) and one was an interview with a pair of musicians who had burned a million pounds.The latter episode roughly coincided with my 9th birthday, and I remember being as disgusted as both my parents and the members of the live TV audience at the notion of burning that much money instead of donating it to charity. I had never heard of the band.
It was probably about 10 years later that I became interested in a band called Extreme Noise Terror. I’ve mentioned them before on this blog. I read somewhere that they had performed at the Brit awards with some electronic dance act and that the performance had involved somebody shooting a real gun into the crowd. I remember seeing a very blurry video of the performance (here’s a clearer version) and thinking it was really cool. I probably checked the dance act’s wikipedia or something and learned that they were the same guys that burned the million pounds. I don’t think I gave them much more thought, but as a dedicated grindcore fan at that point, I probably had a much easier time accepting the artistic statement of burning a million pounds.
I don’t remember how I came to discover the fact that I was in the same boat as the KLF. Because they had deliberately deleted their catalogue to make their music inaccessible, it wasn’t until just a few years ago that I first saw the video for Justified and Ancient. It blew my mind. This is a big budget music video featuring a hugely popular country star singing about a sect of Discordians from one of my favourite books of all time, a book that remains relatively unread despite its reputation in conspiracy theory circles. This truly bizarre piece of art had remained hidden for decades at the behest of its creators. In truth, it’s not the kind of music that I enjoy listening to, but I couldn’t help but love it. This is real weirdo stuff, but at one point it had been hugely popular. I was fascinated.
Blackstone Publishing – 2024 (First version published 2012)
A couple of weeks ago, I read John Higg’s The KLF: Chaos, Magic, and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds. It was really entertaining. It’s a strange book to read too because so much of it seems unbelievable. The KLF’s story is so strange that they almost seem like characters from Illuminatus! rather than just fans of the book.
So Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty were essentially failed musicians who had been in a few different projects but had taken on non-creative roles in the music industry. Almost as a joke, they started a “hip-hop” project that consisted of them mashing up famous songs and releasing them as singles. They used their contacts in the music press to drum up a bunch of attention and controversy. The music was fairly crap, but they did media stunts and record burnings to keep the attention going. It worked, but it is unclear as to whether they were just extremely lucky or whether the media stunts they were performing were actually extremely potent and successful chaos magic rituals. After getting a number one single with this approach, they turned away from the mash-up genre and started making stadium house. In reality, they only wrote a few songs, but they reworked and remixed these until they became huge hits. They continued doing weird stuff as they released these songs including making a road movie with no plot and burning a giant wicker man in a ritual in front of a bunch of music journalists on a small Scottish island.
In 1992, they were awarded the best British group award at the Brit Awards. It was in response to their growing popularity that they invited Extreme Noise Terror to perform with them. They also left a dead sheep outside the venue. Within a few weeks of that awards ceremony, the band quit the music industry and deleted their music. The money burning happened a few months later.
Higgs’ book is great. It has plenty of detail on the story of the band, but it also gets into odd theories too. There’s a chapter on Alan Moore, who seems to have been friends with the band, and there is even mention of psychogeography in here. The book heavily leans into RAW’s reality tunnel ideas too. The KLF claimed they were members of the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (JAM). (The JAMs were agents of chaos fighting against the Illuminati in Illuminatus!) Anyone who has read Illuminatus! will remember Operation Mindfuck, the Discordian effort to thoroughly mess with people’s heads at any cost. That Drummond and Cauty leaned into the promulgation of chaos is obvious, but Higgs discusses the interesting idea that they were driven to do so by external forces rather than internal ones.
After reading the book, I also watched the 2021 documentary, Who Killed the KLF? I’m used to reading about bizarre stuff, but seeing video footage of what I had just read about was quite weird. These things really happened. The way we consume media is so different now compared to the late 80s/early 90s that it’s really hard to imagine anything as weird as the KLF becoming hugely popular again. I know there are still plenty of brilliant oddballs out there being creative, but I feel like it’s a shame that they’ll never have to chance to share their weirdness with a mainstream audience. At the same time, it was very encouraging to see people really pushing the boundaries of popular entertainment. Markoff Chaney would be proud.
In honesty though, I still think that burning the million pounds was lame.
It has been a long time since I gave up on a book. When I started this blog, I had more free time and hence more tolerance for absolute bullshit. The last time I started a book and actually found myself unable to finish it was back in 2016 when I attempted a book called You Are Becoming A Galactic Human. A few years ago, I read a book by Tracy Twyman and a friend recommended I read a book by her pal Nicholas De Vere. I knew it was more on the bloodline of Christ story, but aside from that I had no idea what it would be like.
Book Tree – 20024
Before starting, I looked this de Vere guy up. He died a few years ago, but there’s some fairly bizarre claims about him on the internet. He traced his ancestry back and found out that he was descended from royalty, and it seems like he managed to have a royal title legitimately conferred on himself, but I’m not sure of the details there. He also claimed that he was a descendant of Elves, Vampires and potentially Jesus Christ.
I don’t think many people have read this man’s work. Part of this is due to the obscure nature of his claims, and part of it is likely how difficult he made it to understand what he was actually claiming. I spent over a week’s worth of reading on this book and got through less than half of it. The first few chapters weren’t easy to follow, but I could get the basic gist of what they were saying. It became so agonizing after a few hundred pages that I had to give up. My brain wasn’t taking anything in, and I didn’t want to waste another 2-3 weeks staring a book that wasn’t making any sense at all.
I’m going to summarize what I understood of the first few chapters.
Chapter 1 Human beings are dumb idiots. The Dragons (people with dragon blood) are Elves and are a separate species who have been persecuted for the last 1000 years. They are magic and exist on a higher realm that normal humans can’t comprehend. They have better senses than normal people like some animals do. The Grail Code is only applicable between Dragons because everyone else is shit. Dragons ritualistically drink the blood of their kings to gain their knowledge. Literally. Jesus was actually Satanic because Satan was actually good.
Chapter 2 Vampires and witches are all elves. When I was reading the words ‘elf’ and ‘elves’ in the previous chapter, I found it difficult not to think of the elves of Tolkien. It turns out I was right to think this way because those are the kind of elves that the author is talking about.
Chapter 3 Dracula is based in fact. Stoker was actually in the Golden Dawn and based his novel on insider information. Real vampires only drank the menses of beautiful virgins. This would make it likely that Jesus was in fact a vampire.
Chapter 4 The Elves faced a worse holocaust than the Jews. Again, the elves are literally like the elves in Lord of the Rings. The author compares homo-sapiens to hobbits. The elves who kept their bloodline pure weren’t racist because asking them to have sex with a regular person would be like asking a black person to have sex with a monkey. It’s not racist for them to refuse that! (This logic is not mine!)
Chapter 5 Things are getting complicated now. The author seems to think he’s talking to a mate that already understands all of this stuff. He gets into his family history. The de Vere dragon family are far superior to current monarchs who aren’t elven at all. He makes some good points about how garbage collectors never get knighted but provide a much more important service than actors or football managers. I thought this was a very interesting thought.
Chapter 6 Agonizing swill cross referencing grail lore, Irish mythology, kabala and numerology. The main take aways here are the swastika and the Star of David are the same thing. Jews are Aryan. The salmon of knowledge is actually a euphemism for licking the pussy off a beautiful woman. It really seems like the author lives in his own world. He seems to forget that people will have a hard time with him using words that generally mean the precise opposite of how he uses them.
Chapter 7 I cannot read this book anymore. I like the ideas, but the writing is too frantic and confusing.
I am sure there are gems spread throughout the rest of the book, but I am not able to spend any more time reading it. I’m sure de Vere’s fans will say that I’m just a mudblood homo-sapien who wouldn’t be expected to understand intelligent literature like this, but I could trace my ancestry back to the Merovingian Dynasty if I tried hard enough, so I am likely an elf, vampire and a dragon too.
Sorry, I am still on holidays, so my weekly post is late again. In April of last year, I mentioned my intention to do a post on books about Jack the Ripper. I recently reread Alan Moore’s From Hell for my post on Nicholas Hawksmoor, the Satanic architect, and before doing so I decided to prime myself by reading Donald Rumbelow’s The Complete Jack the Ripper.
The Complete Jack the Ripper – Donald Rumbelow
Virgin Books – 2016 (First published 1975)
This is the first and only non-fiction book I have read about the Whitechapel murders, and while I don’t have anything to compare it to, I was very pleased that I read this first. This book, as far as I can tell, restrains itself to the facts of the case. It outlines what is known about what happened in Whitechapel during the Jack the Ripper murders. It provides background on several of the key suspects in the murders, but it does not present any one of these characters as the likeliest candidate. The book does a very good job of making it very clear that this is a very complex case that, for many reasons, will likely remain unsolved. I don’t want to get into the events of the murders here as that information is available in a million other places, and I have no clever insights to offer. If you are interested in this case, I reckon this book is an excellent starting point. I’m actually a little hesitant to read some of the other books on the case as Rumbelow includes some details on why they’re probably not accurate.
From Hell – Alan Moore
Top Shelf – 2004 (First published 1999)
The first time I read from From Hell was an upsetting experience. I knew that some prostitutes were going to get butchered, but Moore’s story makes them people, and the violence was actually upsetting. It’s a phenomenal piece of art though. I only read a few graphic novels every year, but this is absolutely my favourite. The amount of research and thought that clearly went into is astounding. I strongly suggest that you keep 2 bookmarks handy while reading through it, one to keep your place in the story and one for the corresponding chapter notes at the back of the book. You must read both. I was very glad I had read Rumbelow’s book beforehand this time. Knowing something of the case made the depth of Moore’s work even more apparent.
White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings – Iain Sinclair
Gollancz – 1987
I read a bit of Iain Sinclair’s Lud Heat for my Hawksmoor post. I didn’t like it. I was slightly disappointed to find out that he had also written a book that involved the Ripper murders. I knew this guy’s ideas had influenced Alan Moore, and I decided that I should check out his Ripper book too. I was hoping that his White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings would be a bit more straight forward than his poetry. It’s not. It’s one of those arty books with a plot that’s buried underneath a weight of literary wank. I read it over a couple of days a few weeks ago. I’ve been putting off writing about it because I didn’t want to think about it, and now I don’t remember much of what little coherent plot there was. A bunch of ugly booksellers go on a road trip or something. There’s some flashbacks to the time of the killings, but nothing that was of any interest to me. Load of shite.
I’ve noticed a few times that people get upset when I dismiss books for being too deep or arty or clever. My review of Arthur Machen’s The Hill of Dreams was particularly offensive to one individual, and I recall somebody getting quite upset when I made fun of Stephen King’s attempt at critical writing in Danse Macabre. If you’re one of these people, fuck you, nerd. Kiss my hole.
These three books were my first real foray into Ripperology. I’m certainly not averse to the idea of reading more on the topic, but my curiosity has largely been satiated. I’d be interested in books that attribute Satanic, occult or extraterrestrial motives to the murders, and while I assume such books probably exist, I also assume that they’re complete rubbish. Much of the allure of reading about the Ripper murders is the fact that these brutal crimes have remained unsolved for more than a century despite the attention they have received. There’s so many theories and suspects that reading more facts about the case doesn’t really hold any appeal for me at this stage. I either want a definitive explanation of who was responsible or I want ridiculous (yet sincere) claims that it was a vampire.
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.
Last week, I was looking through a set of “Myth or Real” trading cards on archive.org. It featured bigfoot, mothman, and many of the popular cryptids, but there were also 2 cards on a mysterious character called the Mad Gasser of Mattoon. The cards looked cool, and I had never heard of this chap before, so I decided to do a little research.
So in 1944, the small town of Mattoon was terrorized by a weirdo with a cannister of gas. He was running around town spraying this stuff into people’s homes, making them cough, puke and pass out. Nobody died or suffered any lasting problems because of these attacks, but the residents of Mattoon were spooked. Many of the men in town were away, fighting in the second world war, and most of the Gasser’s victims were women. Rumours went around that Gasser was a large, warty ape with a gas gun. The source of this rather fantastic element to the story was added by the town’s local psychic. It was later hypothesized that the Gasser was able to evade police because he had teleportation device.
Over the course of 2 weeks, there were more than 20 attacks. While it is likely that some people did experience something out of the ordinary, it seems probable that the local media’s sensational coverage of the story riled the town’s populace up to an extent that people were looking for something to cough over. After two weeks with little to no progress on the case, local police said that any further victims wishing to report a gas attack would have to submit to medical testing to verify their story. This almost immediately put an end to the reports, and the entire case was soon written off as an example of mass hysteria. There was no Mad Gasser. It was all just the imaginings of some hysterical, lonely women.
Or was it?
The Mad Gasser of Mattoon: Dispelling the Hysteria – Scott Maruna
Swamp Gas Book Co. – 2003
In this 2003 book, the author, Scott Maruna, a chemistry teacher, argues that the hullaballoo around the Mad Gasser was not a case of mass hysteria. There actually was a mad person running around spraying gas into people’s windows. His name was Farley, and he was a closeted homosexual. He was an amateur chemist and apparently ended up in a mental asylum shortly after the gas attacks. His father was an influential person in Mattoon, and so it’s possible everything was covered up.
I have no way of knowing whether Maruna’s claims are true or not, but the book is well written and there’s nothing in here that seems like a huge stretch. Enough time has gone by now that we will never know for certain, but it may well have been Farley. It makes sense to me that a real creep started the panic in Mattoon and that the media blew it way out of proportion resulting in a town-wide state of panic. The claims that the Gasser was a transdimensional alien ape with a ray gun are certainly appealing, but maybe a little unlikely.
Maruna’s book is short (just over 100 pages), and I read it in one sitting. It seems like a fairly complete account of the Mad Gasser phenomenon, and aside from a few recently self-published attempts, there doesn’t seem to be any other books about the topic. Give this a read if you’re interested in the case. Physical copies are pretty hard to come by, but there’s a copy up on archive.org if you need it.
Nocturnal Revelries 