Audiobooks about the topics I’m interested in are difficult to find (for free). A few weeks ago, I saw an audiobook version of Linda S. Godfrey’s I Know What I Saw, a book about American cryptids, and decided to give it a go. I hadn’t heard of Godfrey before, and seeing that the book was published by Penguin, I thought it could be quite good. I’ve read a few books about Fortean topics by accomplished writers that walk a very entertaining line of openness and critical thinking, and I guess I was hoping for something along the lines of Jon Ronson‘s conspiracy theory books. Cryptozoology is an interesting field, but many of the books on this topic are completely devoid of skepticism.
I Know What I Saw – Linda S. Godfrey
TarcherPerigee – 2019
Unfortunately, I Know What I Saw is another of these books. The author presents countless sightings of cryptids (mostly dog-like creatures), none of which are difficult to dismiss as bullshit. I am sure Godfrey received less believable accounts that she didn’t include, but that doesn’t make the stuff in here any more credible to an ordinary person who doesn’t spend all their time reading about monster sightings.
The fact that I only recently finished reading McEwan’s Mystery Animals of Britain and Irelandmay have affected my enjoyment of Godfrey’s book. Both texts are similar books about different locations, but Godfrey’s book is made up of reports sent to the author over the internet rather than accounts in other books or newspaper clippings. McEwan’s book didn’t convince me of anything, but I am definitely biased against information sent over the internet, and Godfrey’s book seemed more credulous because of its sources.
Another thing that really set me against this book was the author’s claim in one of the opening chapters that, “the Scandinavian countries became largely Christianized around 1000 BCE”. I heard the narrator read that and assumed that it was a mistake, but then I checked an ebook copy of the book and was able to confirm that Godfrey did actually claim that Scandinavia was somehow Chrstianized an entire millenium before Christ was born. Everyone makes mistakes, but I find it hard to imagine how this one was published.
There’s descriptions of encounters with Bigfoot, Goatman and a few other weirdos, but not much stuck out to me. The weirdest part was the account of a man who saw 2 dogs whose movements were so similar that he thought were robots. There’s another part where the author discusses if Bigfoot might be descendants of the Biblical character Esau. This is silly nonsense.
I’ve been running this blog for a long time, and there are occasions when I feel like I’m running out of books to read. A few years ago I was a bit stuck, so did a google search for Fortean books. I had read a lot of the results, but there were a few titles that piqued my interest. One of these was Graham J. McEwan’s Mystery Animals of Britain and Ireland. It took me a few years to track down a copy, and once I got my hands on one, it lay on the shelf for over a year before I actually read it.
Robert Hale – 1986
In truth, this book was largely quite boring. It deals with 4 main categories of cryptids: big cats, sea serpents, lake monsters and black dogs. The chapters on these topics are mostly made up of reported sightings. This is thorough, but it makes for dull reading.
I’ve come across the large cat thing before. There definitely seems to be something to these sightings, but it seems certain that the majority of these cases were escaped pets. They’re not cryptids or supernatural beings. The lake monsters and sea serpents sections make repeated references to Tony “Doc” Shiels, a man who managed to see and take pictures of both the Loch Ness monsters and Morgawr. It is widely accepted that he faked these sightings and photographs. None of the water monster stuff seemed remotely convincing to me. The last big category, the black dog sightings, is perhaps the most underwhelming. People all around rural Ireland and the UK have reported seeing large black dogs roaming around at night. It’s not hard to imagine a person encountering a stray or escaped dog in the countryside at night. Dogs all look black when it’s dark. The supernatural elements of these stories are silly.
The best part of the book is the penultimate chapter in which the author lists all of the other cryptid reportings from across Ireland and the UK. These feature the Owlman of Mawnan, the shoggothic Shapeless One of Somerset and the Scottish fox that walked on two legs and wore a top hat that I encountered previously in Affleck Gray’s The Big Grey Man of Ben MacDhui. I think the reason this book initially appealed to me was the fact that it dealt with Irish cryptids too. I’ll try to pay a visit to the lake monster in Lough Bray and the giant black dog of Templeogue the next time I’m home. I may even go looking for the elusive Horseman of Louth if I have the time.
One of the most interesting parts of the book was on the Hexham Heads. These were a set of stone heads that showed up in the 1970s that had supposedly been carved by the ancient Celts. There were reports that anyone who took them home suffered bad luck, and one family was even attacked by a werewolf for taking them. These heads disappeared soon after they found media attention. Although I hadn’t heard of these carvings before, their story seemed remarkably familiar. I then realised that it’s the exact plot of Paul Huson’s The Keepsake, a horror novel that I reviewed a few years back.
There is some good stuff in this book, but read cover to cover, it’s not hugely entertaining. It’s more fun to flick through to search for things from your specific area of interest. Aside from the reports of sightings, the book also contains a limited amount of postulation on the nature of the creatures. I found this quite similar to the arguments in Ted Holiday’s The Goblin Universe, a book that is referenced multiple times throughout McEwan’s text.
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.
I normally post on Sundays, but I had a busier weekend than expected, so you’re getting this on a Tuesday. Sorry!
Sasquatch Books – 1992
I’m planning a camping trip in the Pacific Northwest this summer, so I thought I’d read this Field Guide to the Sasquatch in the hopes of improving my chances of seeing a bigfoot. Unfortunately, this book contains little I haven’t encountered in greater detail before. It’s short and quite readable, but it was only when I sat down to write about it that I realised how incomplete it is. It contains the standard physical description of a sasquatch and lists a few places where they have been spotted, but the author assumes that sasquatch is a species of giant ape and gives no consideration to the idea that it might be a transdimensional entity. This text’s brevity and failure to consider the more fringe theories on the origins of sasquatch render it obsolete at this point. There’s not much point in reading this one.
This thing was written more than 30 years ago, and with every day that has passed, the likelihood of bigfoot’s existence has diminished. It’s disappointing, but I’m slowly coming to terms with the fact that I’ll probably never see one. I’m going into the woods in August though, so fingers crossed!
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.
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.
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.”
Over the years I have done posts on books about some of the better known cryptids including the Jersey Devil, the Mothman and a few on Sasquatch. In truth, I never found any of these cases particularly convincing. I’ve read a few other books about the field of cryptozoology, but I hadn’t done any on specific cryptids in a long time. I recently did posts on books about the Pigman and the Goatman, and when I saw a book about the Lizardman, I decided it was only fair that I give him a chance too.
In the late 80s, some people in Bishopville, South Carolina, claimed to see a monster. Some cars in the area were damaged. The descriptions of the creature varied, but some claimed he was like a hairless sasquatch.
Like the author of Goatman, Lyle Blackburn does an excellent job documenting the Lizardman phenomena. The story is clear, and obviously well researched. Unfortunately, none of the accounts herein are remotely convincing.
Lizardman never hurt anyone. Nobody ever went missing. None of the sightings are particularly interesting. One witness later admitted he was lying. A few people claim they saw something they couldn’t explain. Their descriptions of the monster are so different that it’s hard to accept any of this. Lizardman doesn’t exist. At best he’s just a muddy sasquatch.
This is a decent book about a very silly topic.
There were a few points in the text where the author referenced the fact that he is a musician. I decided to see if he had any recordings on the internet. It turns out that he was a founding member of Solitude Aeturnus and played on their a bunch of their albums, including my personal favourite, Through the Darkest Hour from 1994. This dude played in an awesome heavy metal band and then started writing books about cryptids. Cool.
Honestly, I had never heard of Goatman before seeing this book, and I was surprised to find that it’s not just something the author made up. Goatman is an American urban legend. He’s a half-man, half-goat freak that kills teenagers when they are making out in their cars. Some believe he was a genetic experiment gone wrong, but others believe that he was a dude who was wrongfully executed. His head popped off when he was hung, so he replaced it with a goat’s head and set out for revenge. Pretty cool.
This is obviously just a story that has no basis in reality. Nobody has ever had any proof that such a creature exists, and all sightings of such a creature have been sketchy and unbelievable. Despite this, J. Nathan Couch wrote a book that questions if such a creature could be real.
Things get ridiculous pretty quickly. The author questions if Goatman could be a satyr, a descendant of the Greek God Pan. Couch acknowledges that this seems unlikely, but he rolls with it anyway. In a way, I admire the author’s approach in this book. He leaves no stone unturned. He examines every piece of evidence and considers all possibilities. It’s still pretty silly though. In books about Bigfoot, there is nearly always a discussion on the possibility that the Bigfoot sighted was just a bear, a far more realistic scenario. In this book, there’s discussions on possibility that the Goatman was just a Bigfoot. Goatman can even talk in a few of the encounters described. Surely nobody actually believes in this?
Ultimately, Couch admits that Goatman is almost definitely just an urban legend. He claims that the stories may have originated from a real lad who used to travel around America with some goats. Even this seems pretty unlikely to be honest.
This book was clearly well researched, and while Couch discusses crazy ideas and unbelievable witness accounts, he doesn’t blindly accept them or present them as factual. This is a pretty good book on the Goatman phenomena. The problem is that the Goatman phenomena is really dumb (maybe a little less dumb than Pigman, but dumb nonetheless).
Blimey chaps! To celebrate the king’s coronation, we’re ‘avin’ a gander at two books from me mate, Lee Brickley, a paranormal researcher from England, innit?
Independently published – 2021
On the Hunt for the British Bigfoot
I don’t think Sasquatch exists. The Pacific Northwest has some of the biggest forests in the world, but people go into these forests every day, and everyone has had a camera on their phones for at least 10 years now. There’s no proof, and the likelihood of proof showing up becomes less and less likely every day. I sincerely hope I am wrong about this, but I doubt we’ll ever find Bigfoot.
Lee Brickley is a paranormal researcher from England. He wrote a book about the British Bigfoot. He claims this creature lives in Cannock Chase. Cannock Chase is a 26 square mile forest in the West Midlands of England. This book recounts several incidents that Brickley and others had with the beast.
Most of these incidents happened within a couple of years of each other, and nearly all of them happened at night. One witness literally claims that the beast looked like “some huge bloke in a monkey costume”, and when Brickley saw the beast himself, a feeling of awe overtook him and he forgot to take out his camera to take a picture… sure.
Brickley claims that he has a frozen footprint in his freezer and that a sample he found in the forest was taken by a shady government agency too.
This is one of the least convincing books I have ever read. I understand that an author choosing to write about topics like this shouldn’t get too wrapped up in pandering to sceptics, but there has to be more evidence than this. It really seems like that author’s motivation for writing this book was his desire to write a book about an English bigfoot. He doesn’t seem to have been concerned with making what he says believable.
Again, Cannock Chase covers 26 square miles. The Rocky Mountains, where Sasquatch is supposed to reside, cover well over 38,000 square miles. If you’re going to try to show that there’s a Bigfoot in the former, you’re going to need something more convincing than an Elvis impersonator claiming he saw a hairy face in his window.
Yam Yam Books – 2013
UFOs, Werewolves & the Pig-man
This book was writen a few years before the Bigfoot one. It’s a more general look at the reports of odd disturbances at Cannock Chase. It’s easier to accept some of what’s written here as the reported incidents being discussed occurred over a much longer time frame, and they’re not all the about the same thing. None of them are particularly convincing, but they seem less like lies than the Bigfoot claims.
This book features aliens, giant cats and snakes, ghosts, werewolves, demons and underground government tunnels. It almost reads like a proposal for a season of a shitty British version of the X-Files.
“This shit’s about to get really weird.”
Lee Brickley
The above is actually a quote from the book that introduces its most intriguing section, the chapter on the Pig-Man of Cannock Chase. Apparently some twisted scientists during the Second World War were messing with genetic engineering and got a woman pregnant with sperm that had been riddled with pig DNA. She didn’t show any signs of pregnancy for a while, but a year and a half later she gave birth to a half-man, half-pig creature and abandoned her job and family to live with her mutant offspring in the woods. She supposedly died a few years later, but the pig man lived on. The author heard this story from a waiter in a local restaurant.
There is far space in the book given to the pigman’s background story than there is on his sightings. One of the three people who claim to have seen the pigman was a teenager. He claims he was out at night when a naked man who looked a bit like a pig started chasing him. It was probably just Prince Andrew.
Again, nothing in this book was remotely convincing. The author seems to have written it for people who are willing to completely suspend critical thought. I’m sure these books were fun to write, but I honestly can’t imagine anyone taking them seriously.
Nocturnal Revelries 