Kelleher and Knapp’s Hunt for the Skinwalker

Hunt for the Skinwalker: Science Confronts the Unexplained at a Remote Ranch in Utah
Colm A. Kelleher Ph.D., and George Knapp
Paraview Pocket Books – 2005

In the mid 1990s, a family claimed that they had witnessed a bunch of weird stuff (UFOs, sasquatches, poltergeist activity, werewolves…) on their ranch. They convinced a right-wing millionaire to buy their ranch so that he could study the phenomena. He spent millions of dollars hiring a bunch of scientists to study the ranch. After several years of observation, the scientists had absolutely zero proof of anything remotely weird happening there.

This book is an attempt to justify all of the time and money that were wasted on this project.

I started off enjoying this. It begins with a giant, bullet-proof wolf prowling around the ranch and soon suggests that the weird stuff that is happening may be being caused by the souls of a bunch of Buffalo-soldier freemasons whose graves had been disturbed by a tribe of Native Americans. I’ve read so much fiction recently that it was very easy for me to suspend disbelief and enjoy the narrative here for its weirdness.

Unfortunately, the Hunt for the Skinwalker soon devolves into the same anti-science rhetoric that I’ve encountered so many times in books about this kind of nonsense. Modern science is too close-minded to reveal anything meaningful about the paranormal. My hole. Honestly, this book was so dumb that I feel absolutely zero desire to try to counter its claims. It’s too stupid to take seriously.

The authors had so little to go on that much of the book is actually taken up with chapters about other places where spooky events have occurred. At one point this book references the work of Tom Dongo. I had a good laugh seeing him listed as a source. The authors here also include testimony from people who remotely-viewed the ranch and sensed a bad presence.

Also, only a small part of the book discusses skinwalkers. Skinwalkers are a kind of evil Native American witchdoctor that can shapeshift. The book concludes that skinwalkers are likely to blame because the authors don’t have any better explanation.

This book is garbage. If you have a copy and haven’t read it, don’t waste your time. Tear it up and use it to make a poo sandwich instead.

Basil Tyson’s UFOs Satanic Terror

Mysterious humanoids are roaming our earth, and a diabolical plan of deception, delusion, and destruction has already commenced.

UFOs Satanic Terror – Basil Tyson

Horizon – 1977

I ordered a copy of this book immediately after discovering its existence. I knew that there was no way it could live up to its title, but I needed to have a copy of it on my bookshelf regardless.

The basic idea here is that aliens are actually just servants of the Devil who have been sent to Earth to lead people away from Christianity. The book doesn’t really give any sensible explanation of this theory though. It’s more of a “we don’t understand this, so it must be the Devil” deal.

The one remarkable thing about this book is the way it highlights the narrowness of the author’s worldview. I don’t believe in extraterrestials visiting Earth, but Basil Tyson’s arguments against this narrative are more ridiculous than the narrative itself. He uses passages from the Old Testament to explain events that were supposedly happening the the 20th century. Basil Tyson really comes across as a frightened, confused fool.

After spending much of the book discussing how occultism is dangerous, Tyson claims to be a psychic himself. This is part of the reason he knows so much about the UFO phenomenon. He claims that several demons have appeared to him over the course of his life, one was disguised as his mom. He talked to these demons, and he was even brave enough to laugh at one who was not particularly scary. A tough lad was our Basil.

Basil Tyson was a crazy man, and this is a crazy book. Unfortunately, it’s actually quite a boring read. If you’re into this kind of thing, Bob Larson’s UFOs and the Alien Agenda is a more entertaining piece of garbage on the exact same topic.

I.R.Aliens: Dermot Butler and Carl Nally’s Circle of Deceit

Circle of Deceit: A Terrifying Alien Agenda in Ireland and Beyond

Dermot Butler and Carl Nally
Flying Disk Press – 2018

The first half of this book is the boring, yet rather upsetting, account of the mutilation of hundreds of sheep on the McLaughlin’s farm in Derry. A bunch of sheep on this one particular farm had their tongues and eyeballs and other bits sliced out. The farmer believed this was being done by his neighbour, and he tried to get help from the local police force and government to put a stop to it. The police put up a few security cameras but wouldn’t let the farmer ever see the footage they captured. The authorities’ conclusion was that birds were responsible. The farmer didn’t agree that it was birds. The lad who he thought was responsible died, but the mutilations continued. The farmer was very upset that the authorities weren’t doing more to help him. It seemed like they were ignoring him.

There’s nothing about that story that’s hard to believe. Animals were being mutilated. There’s tonnes of evidence that show this. Before we go any further, ask yourself the following questions:

Are the police force and local politicians in Northern Ireland capable of not giving appropriate attention to the problems of one specific farmer farmer?
Are there people in Derry who are willing to act out on grudges that go back generations?
Are there any other possible explanations for the unfortunate mutilations of farm animals?

To me, it seems that the answer to all of these questions is a big fat yes. The authors of this book claim that the mutilations were caused by aliens. That seems unlikely to me, but I’m definitely willing to consider it. The difficulty for me is that the authors of this book claim that the authorities in Northern Ireland were trying to cover up the fact that the mutilations were caused by aliens.

Here’s another question:

Is it more likely that the authorities in Northern Ireland are so disorganized that they can’t deal with the problems of a single farmer or so organized that they are working together with global governments to cover up the existence of aliens?

I’m sorry, but this is silly. There’s a difference between being open-minded and gullible.

When it comes to this kind of stuff, I can suspend disbelief for the sake of entertainment, but after spending roughly half the book discussing real events that actually happened, the authors jump straight to quotes from the Old Testament to suggest that the mutilations on the McLaughlin’s farm were caused by aliens who are using sheep’s tongues to keep themselves alive for millennia. Come on guys, you’re supposed to ease us in. I need a little foreplay before you start quoting scripture at me. After this they go on to point out that over 100 legal firms refused to get involved in the case. They claim that this was because the legal firms were being intimidated by the government into refusing service, but it seems far more likely that the firms didn’t want to deal with the crazies that had attached themselves to the McLaughlins.

The authors go on to suggest that aliens are abducting and treating humans in the same way. They seem to believe we should all be very worried about this.

I want to believe. I really do, but this book wasn’t remotely convincing. The authors mention countless cases of animal mutilations and human disappearances, but there’s little here that sticks these cases together apart from paranoia and a willingness to ignore common sense.

Secret Cipher of the UFOnauts and Secret Rituals of the Men in Black by Allen H. Greenfield

Secret Cipher of the UFOnauts
Secret Rituals of the Men in Black
Allen H. Greenfield

Here are two books by the same author that make up one whole. Let me attempt to briefly summarise their contents:

Humanity has been in contact with ultraterrestrial forces for millennia. A kind of merman from Sirius came down to Earth a long time ago and taught us how to organise civilisation.

The secret wisdom of the fish god has been passed down through the coded messages of myths and the ciphered language of the rituals of secret societies. Very few humans still understand the true messages behind these stories and rites. Magic is ultraterrestrial technology, and most, if not all, aspects of the Occult relate to this technology.

summoning alien.jpg
In 1904, Aleister Crowley received messages from Aiwass, a discarnate entity. Within these messages was a key to the ciphered messages of the UFOnauts (ultraterrestrials), but despite his efforts, Crowley wasn’t able to find the key within the message that he himself had channeled. Some of Crowley’s followers discovered the key to the cipher in the 70s.

Allen Greenfield, the author of these books, claims that this key unlocks the meanings of the nonsensical names of aliens and planets given by UFO contactees. It also decodes elements of the secret rituals of certain masonic fraternities.

The deciphered meaning of these terms and rituals gives credence to the claim that ultraterrestrials have long been meddling in human affairs. Some aliens seem to be good, but others are pretty bad.

These books are not easy reading, but that’s their basic message as far as I can tell. The evidence given for these claims is fairly cabbalistic, and I don’t have the background or the patience to assess it properly. I read every word in the book, but entire paragraphs went entirely over my head. There’s a lot of references to different contactee cases that I am only mildly familiar with and a good deal of discussion on different aspects of freemasonry that I didn’t get at all.

I feel that things might have made more sense to me if I had already read Robert Temple’s The Sirius Mystery. It’s mentioned quite a few times in here. I’ve had a copy of this book on my shelf for years, bit I’ve found it tough to work up enough courage to actually read it. I suppose I should really look through it before delving any deeper into UFO lore.

Philip K. Dick’s VALIS was also mentioned in here quite a few times. VALIS was one of the first of Dick’s novels I read, and I remember finding it quite confusing at the time. I wonder if it’d make more sense to me now. I thought it was pretty cool to see Dick’s work being discussed alongside Crowley’s.

The main texts of both Secret Cipher and Secret Rituals are followed by interviews with an individual who calls himself Terry R. Wriste, and these interviews contain the most entertaining, most straightforward and most unbelievable parts of the books. In one of them, this Wriste guy describes being part of an underground shootout between a group of Vietnam veterans and a bunch of aliens. Wriste was one of the only survivors. In the other interview, he claims that UFOs can be shot down with sex energy. So remember, if you’re ever about to be abducted by an alien, just whip out your dick or pussy and rub it in their direction. They’ll disappear.

Robert Anton Wilson described Secret Cipher as “A very strange book, even for the field of UFOlogy”, and I have to agree with him. This stuff is mental. It was nice reading it so soon after Dark Gods by Roberts and Gilbertson as that book discusses a lot of the same cases. I cut down on the alien books after reviewing a bunch of new-age channeling nonsense a few years ago, but the books I’ve been reading recently have got me interested again. I’ve been enjoying the way they bring other aspects of the Occult to their discussions.

I’ve found it a bit tricky to figure out accurate publishing information for Greenfield’s books. The first one, Secret Cipher, was originally published in 1994. I’m not sure when the second one, Secret Rituals, was published, but I know it wasn’t after 1995. I read the 2005 digital editions of both texts. (Secret Cipher of the UFOnauts, Secret Rituals of the Men in Black) The texts are about the same thing, and I’m certain they’re meant to be read together. A few years ago, the author put out another book, The Complete Secret Cipher of the UFOnauts. I haven’t been able to verify this, but it seems probable to me that that text is just the other two books stuck together.

Dark Gods – Anthony Roberts and Geoff Gilbertson

Dark Gods – Anthony Roberts and Geoff Gilbertson
Rider/Hutchinson – 1980

Malevolent forces from another dimension have long been plotting against humanity. Throughout history these forces have manifested as demons, angels, spirits, fairies, vampires, dragons, aliens and Men in Black. They have convinced some humans to create secret societies that unwittingly aim to bring about the downfall of humanity. Lovecraft’s tales are not mere fiction. Nyarlathotep and Cthulhu are very real, and they’re patiently waiting for misguided humans to call them forth so that they can lead us into an era of blasphemous anarchy and interdimensional terror.

I mean… if you don’t want to read this book after that description, you’re on the wrong blog.

There’s so much to unpack here. This utterly insane book takes the work of H.P. Lovecraft, Bulwer Lytton, Erich Von Däniken, Francis King, Pauwels and Bergier, Eliphas Levi, Aleister Crowley, Trevor Ravenscroft, and John Keel and mixes it with Biblical Lore, black magic, cryptozoology, secret society conspiracy theories and UFO abduction stories. This is essential reading.

h.p.lovecraft - tom evesonjpg.jpg I’ve seen this image of Lovecraft before. It’s by Tom Eveson.

When I read Colin Wilson’s The Occult, I complained about the author’s unquestioning acceptance of ridiculous ideas. This approach made a little more sense to me after I read Morning of the Magicians by Pauwels and Bergier and understood their concept of fantastic realism, but I still thought of Wilson as a fairly credulous yet knowledgeable individual. Wilson actually wrote the foreword for this book, and it’s rather telling that he seems uncomfortable accepting this book’s findings. While he praises the authors of Dark Gods’ inquisitive vigor, he can not endorse their blind acceptance of their own conjecture. What is too much for Wilson will be far too much for almost everybody else.

Truly, this is a ridiculous book. There is no consideration given to the reliability of any of the authors’ sources; they even accept testimony from individuals they acknowledge as being liars. They make no distinction between myths, fiction and eye-witness witness reports. Lovecraft’s short stories, extracts from The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus and Bulwer Lyton’s novel The Coming Race are presented alongside historical documents as proof of the conspiracy.

I don’t mind authors being ridiculous if the material they’re presenting is entertaining, but unfortunately, not all of the stuff in here is hugely interesting. Much of the second half of the book is taken up with descriptions of different secret societies such as the Golden Dawn, the Illuminati and even the Bilderburg Group. I recently wrote about my current disdain for conspiracy theories, and I found this section of the book to be grueling. The general message of the last 100 pages or so can be summed up by saying that any secret society that claims to offer illumination is actually run by Satanic forces that aim to enslave the society’s members and ultimately destroy humanity. I will give the authors some credit for briefly suggesting Reptilian government leaders 10 years before David Icke went mad, but this part of the book was painfully dull.

dark gods crowley blavatksy weishaupt Madame Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner, Adam Weishaupt, Aleister Crowley, Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Dietrich Eckart – Satanic Illuminatists (Picture by Tom Eveson)

Overall, the writing is quite bad. The authors seem to dance around the points they’re trying to make rather than just stating them clearly. This is particularly unfortunate as the points they are making are hardly common-sense ideas.

Perhaps the most confusing, convoluted part of this book is the bit explaining the motives of the entities who seem to abduct people in UFOs. ‘The phrase ‘seem to’ is very deliberate in that sentence. The authors of Dark Gods don’t believe that aliens are coming to Earth and abducting humans; they believe that interdimensional beings are coming to Earth and pretending to be aliens that are coming to Earth and abducting humans. We’re talking about malevolent ultra-terrestrials, not inquisitive extra terrestrials. (The idea of ultra-terrestrials rather than extra-terrestrials can be found in Whitley Strieber‘s abduction books too, but ol’ Whitley never imagines his visitors to be so deceptive.) Why are these weird entities playing such an elaborate hoax on humanity? According to Gilbertson and Roberts, it’s basically just to confuse us.

golem dark gods This image of a Golem later appeared on the cover of a book by David Schow.

Think about that for a second. Inter-dimensional creatures are crossing over into our dimension and then pretending to be aliens because they think that will make us feel afraid and uncertain. The pretending to be aliens part just seems a little bit redundant to me. They’re inter-dimensional creatures – that’s plenty frightening and confusing. What kind of deranged people came up with this nonsense?

There’s sparse information on the authors available online, and I had to dig around quite a bit for it to paint a cohesive picture. What I could find was fairly depressing. Both men are now dead.

Anthony Roberts had previously published some other books on Atlantis and mythology. Paul Weston, an expert on Glastonbury’s mythology, claims that the mood of Roberts’ earlier books were “considerably different” to Dark Gods. Roberts ran a publication company called Zodiac House with his wife. He died in 1990 while climbing up Glastonbury Tor to see a lunar eclipse. He died of a heart attack, but some have suggested that he was actually killed by fairies for planning to summon the ghost of Robert Kirk, a folklorist who was supposedly abducted by the fairies in 1692. Most accounts of Anthony Roberts that I have found have presented him as a rather temperamental individual. (Sources: an essay on meeting Roberts, Paul Weston’s notes, and Roberts’ obituary on page 12 of The Ley Hunter Winter 1989/1990)

glastonbury tor - dark gods.jpg This creepy image from the book shows the spot where Anthony Roberts would later die.

Geoff Gilbertson died more recently, in 2017. Despite living longer, he seems to have been the more tragic of the pair. He died alone of untreated cancer. I believe Dark Gods is his only book. After publishing it, he supposedly became convinced that the Dark Gods were after him for doing so. He apparently suffered several psychotic breakdowns and spent time living on the streets and in a mental institution. One of his friends believed that he was on the autism spectrum. This guy genuinely seems to have suffered horribly with his mental health. People that knew him seem to have thought him a very nice guy though, a fact which is not true for Anthony Roberts. Nearly all of the information I could find on Gilbertson came from this article.

I’ve read accounts describing both men as unstable. I don’t know how they met or what their relationship was like, but it seems that their interactions with each other created an echo-chamber of Fortean paranoia. Dark Gods doesn’t read like some transparent attempt to synthesize occult ideas in order to make a quick buck. No, this book is a genuine trek into Crazy Town.

I first saw Dark Gods being mentioned on twitter. Somebody was discussing how difficult it is to find these days. Underneath that comment, somebody else had posted a video review of the book by Occult Book Review, one of my favourite youtube accounts. (He’s another Irish dad with an interest in occult books, basically a nicer, smarter, more respectful version of me.) After the first few minutes of that video, I knew I’d have to track down and read this thing as soon as possible.

Doing so wasn’t easy. This book really is quite tricky to find. You’ll be very lucky to buy a copy for less than 200 dollars, and I wasn’t able to find a digital version. With a little bit of work, I managed to get my greedy little claws on a physical copy. It’s actually a very tedious read, but if you’re determined to read it and can’t afford to spend a bunch of money, ask me nicely and I might be able to help you out.

Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism and Nazi Survival – Joscelyn Godwin

arktos joscelyn godwin Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism and Nazi Survival – Joscelyn Godwin
Adventures Unlimited Press – 1996 (Originally published in 1993)

I haven’t enjoyed a non-fiction book this much for quite a while. This is a scholarly, objective and insightful look at some of the most insane conspiracy theories and occult beliefs of the last few centuries. Any book that discusses the writings of Poe, Lovecraft, Robert Charroux, Helena Blavatksy, Edgar Cayce, Otto Rahn, Bulwer Lytton, Julius Evola, Aleister Crowley, Kenneth Grant, Charles Fort, Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier is either going to be absolutely fascinating or absolutely idiotic, and I am happy to report that this book is the former. The overall scope of this work is enormous, but it’s essentially about several of the proposed causes and effects of the Earth’s polar axis shifting at some stage in the past.

The story begins with an Earth that is spinning on an axis that is perpendicular with its orbit around the sun. This state of planetary perfection ensures that there are no seasons, and days and nights are the exact same length in the same places all year round. This Earth is peopled by a race of god-like supermen that came from and mostly still live in the Arctic. After a little while, something catastrophic happens and the Earth goes wobbly. The Arctic freezes up, and the lads are forced to migrate southwards, although some of them stay put and live in the underground part of the Arctic, through which they are able to access the inner realms of the planet. (Oh yeah, I forgot the mention that this Earth is hollow!) The lads that have gone southward meet other races on their travels, but they’re not impressed by these lowly beings and often have to kill a lot of them. The boys who have stayed behind and retreated into the Earth manage to create airships that look a bit like saucers, and they occasionally use these bizarre contraptions to scope out the the outer realms of the planet. Some day these subterranean supermen will emerge to join their relatives, and together they will rule the world.

Just some of the Hollow Earth models as described in this glorious book.

Sound a bit off the wall? Well, this story, or a story very similar to it, is partly to blame for the ideology of the Nazis; the super race from the North are none other than the Aryans. The Nazis are a magnetic target for conspiracy theories, and it would be silly to presume that every Nazi believed in every part of the above story, but it is possible to trace the origins of the notion of Aryan supremacy to some very nutty characters. This book concerns itself with more with where these ideas came from than it does explaining how they were adapted by the Nazis (Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s Occult Roots of Nazism is a better book for that topic.), and Godwin does a really good job of objectively discussing some fairly ludicrous ideas. I never got the sense that he was bullshitting or stretching the truth for his own agenda.

Writing this blog post is a bit slower than usual because I don’t have many bad things to say about this book. There are a couple of chapters in the middle where Godwin discusses his interpretations of the metaphysical and spiritual significance of the poles and pole-lore that are a bit airy-fairy, but they don’t detract from the good stuff. I think the only other part that I wasn’t impressed with was when Godwin refers to Dennis Wheatley, one of my favourite authors, as “a purveyor of rollicking adventure for teenage boys and adults of arrested development”. Other than that, this book is delightful. I mean, it’s heavy going; you have to pay close attention to what’s being discussed if you want to understand it, but I found it hard to put down once I had opened it. It’s 200+ pages of dense text and denser ideas, and it only took me a few days to finish (quite a feat when you’re also responsible for a 3 month old baby).

I’m not going to go any further into the theories contained in this book. I don’t like summarizing books. When I have done so in the past, I have only done so to show how silly the writer has been. This book basically does a far more elegant job of what I try to do with this blog, and so the ideas presented herein have already been broken down and explained very clearly. If you’re interested enough in this blog to have made it this far through this post, you’re almost definitely going to enjoy reading this book. It is, without doubt, one of the best sensible books about crackpot conspiracy theories that I have ever read.

Is Donald Trump in league with eternal Hitler’s subterranean, spaceship-flying Aryan super troops?

The poles do actually shift, and we now know that global warming is currently contributing a few centimeters per year to this tilt. Recently, the international community was ashamed, embarrassed, and appalled by Donald Trump’s rejection of the Paris Climate Agreement. (Seriously America, put down the hamburgers and guns and get your act together.) Despite the glaringly obvious proof that the world is over-heating, Trump and his posse have claimed that they don’t believe in global warming. Now we all know that Donald Trump is a walking, talking piece of solidified diarrhea, but a fool he is not.

How can a man, smart enough to wrangle himself into the most powerful office in the world, possibly think that global warming isn’t happening when everyone can see that temperatures are going up? Let’s not be naive people; Donald knows full well that global warming is occurring.

Donald Trump is not ignoring climate change, he is purposely encouraging it. Why? Because he knows that as the temperature rises, the Earth will readjust its surface to make up for the melted ice-caps and rising water levels. This should draw both the Arctic and Antarctic closer to the equator/ecliptic, thus further speeding up the melting of the ice-locks above the once polar openings to Agartha and Shambala. As soon as these portals are cleared, fleets of Vril powered UFOs filled with the troops of Aryan demigods that the Christ-Hitler has been training shall fly out and take their rightful control over the rest of the planet. After this, Trump can sit at the right hand of der Führer and enjoy the commencement of Kali Yuga.

The Mothman Cometh

the mothman prophecies keel The Mothman Prophecies – John Keel
Tor – 2002 (Originally published in 1975)

When I picked this book up, I expected it to be fairly similar to McCloy and Millet’s The Jersey Devil, a book describing how a strange cryptid briefly terrorized a small town; however, The Mothman Prophecies is more a descriptive synthesis of 4-5 paranormal beings and events, and it doesn’t contain a huge amount of information specifically about the Mothman apparition. The Mothman, you see, at least according to John Keel, is quite probably from another dimension, and its mothy form is likely only one of its possible manifestations.

The book describes several strange events:

The Mothman appeared to several people in Point Pleasant, a small town in West Virginia.
Several other people in this town saw UFOs.
Strange men, dressed in black, showed up in Point Pleasant, asking strange questions to these witnesses.
A few of these witnesses also received bizarre phone calls during which they would hear static, beeping, or a foreign man speaking quickly.

This stuff went on for a while, but when a bridge leading into the town collapsed, killing 48 people, the strange events seemed to stop happening.

The loss of 48 souls to a town that housed fewer than 6000 people would have been devastating, and one can sensibly attribute the cessation of paranormal activity in Point Pleasant after 1967 to its residents going into a period of mourning and spending less time looking for lights in the sky and weirdos in the streets. John Keel however, postulates that Mothman disappeared after the collapse of the bridge because his work as an ill omen was complete. Yes, Mothman has more in common with a guardian angel than he does with Bigfoot.

Most of the book is taken up with descriptions of strange lights seen in the sky. When I reviewed Whitley Strieber’s Transformation, I noted that he had given up the idea that aliens are extraterrestrial and that he now believes that “the visitors are likely trans-dimensional inhabitants of Earth”. It is quite possible that Strieber got this idea directly from Keel. (Strieber was a member or at least attended the meetings of Keel’s New York Fortean Society.) Keel reckons that UFOs are manifestations of something that exists outside of the dimensions that constrain our reality. Whatever it is that is causing the UFO phenomenon is probably the same thing that made people believe in fairies and religious events. If you think about it, a Mothman, as imagined by Keel, is basically the same thing as a Banshee.

Strange lights in the sky and cryptids sightings are cool and all, but the really interesting parts of this book are the bits about the peculiar men who dress in black and spend their time pestering UFO witnesses. Keel wasn’t the first person to write about the Men in Black; that honour, along with the honour of being the first to write a book about Mothman, goes to Keel’s friend, Gray Barker. Originally, the MIB were assumed to be government agents trying to keep witnesses quiet about their UFO encounters, but by the time this book was published, Barker and Keel agreed that the MIB were themselves aliens. Their descriptions in this book are actually pretty cool. They’re always dark skinned (although Keel repeats several times that they’re not black), they have pointy faces and unsettling smiles, their clothes are ill fitting, they don’t understand what common household items are for, and they speak like characters from a Samuel Beckett play.

Overall, the book isn’t very convincing. I had been looking forward to reading it, and it took me quite a bit longer to get through than I had expected. Keel didn’t have enough material to write a more focused book, so he seems to have crammed in any old crap he could find. He starts to contradict himself in the latter half of the book, but he realizes that he’s doing so and attempts to make these contradictions part of his argument. (See the Paranoiacs Are Made, Not Born chapter.) The Men in Black have been so successful in their attempts to obfuscate the public’s understanding of what happened in Point Pleasant that Mothman researchers can’t really know what they know about the topic. I read a review somewhere that described the book as John Keel’s descent into paranoid madness, and if you were to accept all of its claims, I’m sure that reading this book would drive you quite mad.too.

I’m not calling John Keel a liar, but many of the links he propounds are rather tenuous, some of his descriptions are vague, and much of his reasoning is plain shoddy. He was also admittedly very selective with the material he chose to use for this book. I’m not complaining about this (I’m all for that kind of writing!); I mention it only in response to the claim that Keel was paranoid. This is sensational, speculative non-fiction filled with what-ifs; it’s use your imagination stuff. Keel wasn’t mad at all; like he rest of us, he just enjoyed a good conspiracy.

I was fairly disappointed with the cover of my copy of this book. It’s a shitty, ugly version that came out to coincide with the movie version of 2002. (Earlier editions have really cool covers.) I watched the movie there too. I’m still not sure what to think of it. It’s set in the 90s or early 2000s instead of the 60s, and it doesn’t strictly adhere to the events in the book. It also cuts out all of the MIB and UFO stuff, so it’s not quite as all over the place. It looks pretty good, and there’s definitely an atmosphere to it, but I can’t imagine it making much sense to anyone who hasn’t read the book. It’s a little more cohesive without the MIB and flying saucers, but these omissions also render it a little dull, and while it’s not tough to sit through, there’s so little explanation given that you finish the film wondering why they bothered making it.

Well, that’s that. Another Fortean classic for the archives. Some of my long time followers may have noticed that I’ve upgraded this blog with a fancy .com address. My url is now https://nocturnalrevelries.com/. Any old links to the site should still work, but due to an irritating fuck-up, I managed to delete all post likes and cut my traffic in half. Still though, the blog must go on, and I have ordered some seriously atrocious sounding books for my summer reading. Expect to see posts about perverted werewolves, Lovecraftian magick, Satanic Nazis and rock’n’roll themed horror showing up here very soon.

You Are Becoming a Galactic Human and (YHWH) The Book of Knowledge: Keys of Enoch

You are Becoming a Galactic Human – Virginia Essene and Sheldon Nidle
1994 – S.E.E. Publishing

There are three books that I have started and never finished; Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, The Unnameable by Samuel Beckett, and now You are Becoming a Galactic Human by Virginia Essene and Sheldon Nidle. I really tried to get through each of them, but after a while I had to consider what I was going to gain from doing so and weigh that against all of the other things that I could potentially achieve in the time it would take to finish these boring, stupid nightmares. I can tolerate some Joyce and Beckett, but their aforementioned works are very definitely the literary equivalent of the Emperor’s new clothes; people like to think that they’ll seem clever if they manage to slog through them. Finishing You are Becoming a Galactic Human however, offers no such impetus. Although just as ridiculous and confusing as any obscurant modernist drivel, this book is not considered a classic by anyone. It’s a stupid piece of garbagey trash, and anyone who reads it and takes it seriously is a buffoon. If you’ve followed this blog for any length of time, you’ll know that I have a very low standard when it comes to literature, but this smear of shit in your underpants was positively too stupid for me to waste my time on.

timelords Sorry, what?

I review all kinds of nutty books on here, but there comes a point at which the content of a “non-fiction” book becomes so separated from reality that it is no longer intelligible or enjoyable. Bullshit has to have some basis in reality for it to be engaging. Neither The Legend of the Sons of God nor Chariots of the Gods are remotely convincing, but their authors at least attempted to provide some kind of evidence for their claims. Their evidence, however scant and shaky it may be, is based in things that can be checked. In comparison to Essene and Nidle, both Erich Von Däniken and T.C. Lethbridge seem like noble rationalists. The former pair of bozos’ claims are based on channeled messages from extra-terrestrial, extra-dimensional spirits that dwell in different galaxies. I struggled with Preparing for Contact and Unseen Beings, Unseen Worlds for similar reasons, but as ridiculous as those books were, I could just about make out and accept the pretenses of the authors for long enough to allow myself to finish them. I got about 20 pages into You are Becoming a Galactic Human before I had to put it back on the shelf and admit defeat. This is next-level rubbish. Not even the closing message, delivered by the alien Jesus Christ, could compel me to finish this book of nonsense.

moons Ughhhhhhhhhhhh…..

Like Tom Dongo, Sheldon Nidle made himself instantly dislikable by boasting about how clever he is. The chap got some bullshitty degrees from a community college, and he literally thinks he’s a fucking prophet. Realistically, he’s a grown man who likes to play make-believe and has the mental capacity of a low-grade imbecile.

I put the book down when the authors claimed that the Earth was moving towards a ‘Photon Belt’ that would shift our existence into the 5th dimension and cause mental evolution and mass spiritual enlightenment. We were supposed to enter the Photon Belt at some stage between March 1995 and December 1996. Our entrance into the belt was to be signified by 72 hours of complete darkness. These three days would then be followed by 17 years of permanent light. It was during these 17 years that we were to develop ‘incredible psychic abilities’ including telekinesis and telepathy.
Sigh…

As usual, the authors string together as many new-age spiritual concepts as they can manage. I saw parts on chakras, Atlantis, crystals and my favourite old chestnut: telepathic communication with dolphins and whales. It also includes, and I didn’t bother to investigate why, a very inept drawing of some ancient Egyptian deities.

stupid
Even writing this review, I’ve been thinking of trying to read this again at some stage in the future. I know that putting this book down and reading something else was the dignified choice, but I can’t completely shake off the feeling of defeat. In an attempt to preserve some of my honour, I’m going to make a promise to myself, my readers, Virginia Essene and Sheldon Nidle:
I promise that I will read and review You Are Becoming a Galactic Human as soon as our Solar System enters the Photon-Belt.

While I’m on the topic of stupid books about intergalactic-spiritualism, I’ll share a few pics from what is one of the strangest books in my collection.
yhwh (YHWH) The Book of Knowledge: Keys of Enoch – J.J. Hurtak
The Academy for Future Science – 1977 (First published 1973)

In truth, I haven’t even tried to read this one, and I almost definitely never will. As far as I can tell, it’s a book of messages that were delivered to J.J. Hurtak by some kind of angelic entity named Enoch, and from what little I know about Hurtak, I’d imagine ol’ Enoch was probably an alien. J.J. Hurtak was in the enjoyable 2013 documentary, The Hidden Hand: Alien Contact and the Government Cover-Up, (It was on Netflix a while ago. It’s here now.), and he seems like a complete wacko. I picked this book up at a library sale for 2 or 3 dollars, and it’s fancy looking enough that I’ve been keeping it just to decorate my bookshelf.

whoknows This book contains more than 600 pages of this kind of gobbeldy-gick.

shitting-dna Just an Intergalactic Eunuch scatting molecular structures into deep space…

newagegarbage Not sure about the fruity Eqyptian Triclops or the black and white, naked Samurai, but the other guy is definitely 80s Vince Neil, right?

Flicking through this, all I see is an appalling mess of ridiculous pictures, pseudoscience and Biblical references. The notion of having to slog through this revelation of anal spew is genuinely frightening. People try to tell themselves that every experience can be a learning experience. I disagree. Once you have read a few really, really stupid books by people who believe they have talked to heavenly aliens, the only thing you learn from reading another is that the international list of cretins contains one more entry than you previously expected.

Don’t risk adding your own name to that list. Maintain your dignity and avoid these books.

I WANT TO BELIEVE – Alien Encounters and The UFO Phenomenon

cool-ufo
A little over a year ago I did a post on three books from the Time Life Mysteries of the Unknown series. I decided to come back to the series and to read both of its books on aliens. The UFO Phenomenon was published first, and Alien Encounters repeats quite a lot of the same information, but there is a slight distinction in the subject matter. The UFO Phenomenon deals fairly specifically with… UFOs, while Alien Encounters looks more at abductions and contact. I was again impressed by the quality of this series. These books are lovely; they look and feel great, and they are surprisingly in depth. If you can find a complete set for a reasonable price, make sure to pick it up.

covers
UFOs exist. There have definitely been, and presumabably still are, things in the sky that have not been identified. That these objects harbour alien beings from other planets is far less certain. I try to keep an open mind about this kind of stuff. I have no problem believing in the likelihood that there is life on other planets, but the idea that those lifeforms could reach Earth is too much for me to accept. My knowledge of space travel is extremely limited, but I understand that the closest planets that could possibly support life are simply too far away for their inhabitants to ever bother coming here.

The UFO book was cool; I have read lots of other books about ancient alien theories and specific alien encounters, but I didn’t know much about the history of UFOs. It was interesting to see how the flying saucer turned an American cultural icon

billy-meier
I sometimes ponder over how modern technology has affected the acceptability of evidence of alien life on/around Earth. Nearly everyone has constant access to a camera these days, and there is no excuse not to document the spacecraft that are abducting us. At the same time, any form of digital media is susceptible to quick, easy and convincing editing. Not only that, but our skies are now so full of drones and other human made machines that we soon won’t bother to question what’s in the sky… This indifference will leave us vulnerable to external threats… In fact, the more I think about it, the more likely it seems that the aliens deliberately gave our governments their technology in an attempt to lead us into this complacency. We’re falling into their trap! Fuck it. All eyes to the skies!

tomatoman
The above picture is of a famous alien corpse known as Tomato Man. (I have digitally enhanced it for full effect.) The original photo looks like a burned pile of rubbish to me. Some people have wondered how the glasses frames right underneath the alien’s shoulder got mixed up in the debris of an crashed spaceship.

One of most fascinating things about UFOs and aliens are the people that worship them. One particular group, the Unarians, pop up a few times in these books. I had seen some bizarre videos about the Unarius Academy of Science on youtube years ago, and their appearance here convinced me to research them further. It turns out that they don’t believe in imagination. All imagined thoughts are actually memories of past lives. All science fiction is true. Star Wars is real.

The Unarians were led by a lady named Ruth Norman who claimed to be the latest reincarnation of the entity who had previously lived as the Archangel Uriel, Isis, Peter the Great, queen Elizabeth the first, Johannes Kepler, Buddha, Zoroaster, Emperor Charlemagne, Quetzalcoatl, the Dalai Lama, King Arthur and many other aliens and mythical characters. Ruth preached that the space brothers (friendly aliens) were going to descend to Earth and teach us their ways, but she died before this happened.

uriel Uriel, the Legend.

There’s a decent documentary on the Unarians called Children of the Stars that can be viewed here. It doesn’t criticize or question their beliefs; it merely presents them. The documentary goes on a bit too long, but it’s worth watching just to see how mental these people are. Here is the trailer if you are only a little interested, and if you’re super interested, here is Jello Biafra’s documentary on the same group of people.
There’s definitely similarities with the Church of Scientology (although the Unarians deny that they are a religious organization), but unlike L. Ron Hubbard, Uriel genuinely seems to believe her own nonsense. I think she was pretty cool.

rael
This silly looking gobshite also appears in the book. I noticed his interesting necklace and decided to google him. When an image popped up of the same lad in a white suit, I realized that I had seen him before. His name is Claude Vorilhon, but he calls himself Raël, and he claims to be the messenger of the Elohim (alien creators of humanity).

He appeared on the Late Late Show when I was a kid. I remember being very unimpressed by him talking about how Jesus had been an alien. (My, how the times have changed!) The interview stuck in my head, and I’ve only recently thought of looking him up, but I didn’t know his name. Once I discovered his name, I did another quick search and I found footage from one of his earlier appearances on the same show! Normally I dislike when talkshow hosts needlessly talk down to their ‘weirdo’ guests, but I have to say, Gaybo’s swarminess is actually pretty funny here. Apparently Raël wasn’t too upset by it anyway; he went on to appear on the same show two more times. (Unfortunately those episodes are not currently online.)

proof-of-alien-existence A 5 year old drew this, and some people took it as evidence that aliens abducted him.

Reading these books, I wondered how often they were consulted by the writers of the X-Files. The Mysteries of the Unknown series were released between 1987 and 1991. The first episode of the X-Files was written in 1992. I find it hard to believe that some of the ideas for the show weren’t lifted directly from these pages. Just reading over the titles in the series, I’m able to think of specific episodes that refer to the content of nearly each book. In saying that, each of these books presents a fairly comprehensive overview of its topic, and if the X-Files writers weren’t taking their ideas from here, they were certainly getting them from more specific texts on the same topics. All of the mythology episodes (at least up to season 6) could easily have stemmed from the ideas in the two books I have just reviewed. We’re talking alien abductions, disinformation, alien human hybrids, implants, government conspiracies… all that great X-Filesy stuff.

Also, speaking of influencing hit TV series; check this out. There’s a small section at the end of The UFO Phenomenon that called to a mind a more recent science fiction show:
strangerthings Stranger Things, anyone?

I’ll leave you with this. It’s an image of some unfortunates being tormented by demons. It was included in a section on the book proposing that aliens could be the modern equivalent to demons. The similarity being drawn here is that aliens, like demons, have been known to probe their victims. Check out the demon in the bottom left corner. Observe his calm demeanour.

bold “In and out, I’ll lance her clout, Hi-Ho! Hi-Ho! Hi-Ho! Hi-Ho!”

Preparing for Contact: A Metamorphosis of Consciousness – Lyssa Royal and Keith Priest

Royal Priest Research – 1994

Worst of the blurst. This is a new low.

This is a book about how to prepare yourself to communicate with aliens. It’s made up of a series of messages that were sent from a several different extra terrestrial entities through a channeler named Lyssa Royal (now Lyssa Royal Holt). These entities are doing their best to help us prepare to change humanity’s mass consciousness in order to make free and open contact with the inhabitants of other worlds.

On deciding to read this book, I took one look at the cover and thought to myself; ‘Sweet Jesus, this is going to be worse than Whitley Strieber’s bullshit.” Oh, you can only imagine the hearty pat on the back that I gave myself when I opened it up to see that the first chapter opens with a quote from Transformation. (There’s another at the beginning of the 11th chapter, and the 10th opens with a quote from Communion.) Think about that for a second; the people who create this book actually look up to ol’ WhitStrieb.

Channeling is something that annoys me greatly, and nobody makes me want to publicly fill my britches with scat more than J.Z. Knight, the horrendously ugly mutant woman who has undergone failed plastic-surgery and claims to be a channel for Ramtha, a 35,000 year old, Atlantean paedophile. One day, I was watching a video of her and sticking pins into my gooch when one of the related videos caught my eye on account of its title being written in Chinese. I clicked it, and I was very glad that I had done so. It was a video of a bald man pretending to be an alien. At one point in the video, the alien’s accent becomes a hilarious mixture of Indian and the way Irish people sound in American movies. I became fascinated with this character, and I’ve spent more than a reasonable amount of time watching his videos. His name is Darryl Anka, and the alien he channels is named Bashar. Now this might seem only tangentially relevant, but as it turns out, Bashar actually appears in this book! Lyssa intrudes on Darryl’s turf and summons Bashar into her body in one of the final chapters of the book. Reading that part was like meeting an old friend.

Of course, there are others, most likely students of Anka or Priest, who summon the same types of aliens. Here’s another channeling Bashar. This one seems particularly challenged. Fuck, the world is a silly, crazy place.

I’m not going to provide a cohesive summary of the book as that would require looking through it again. Instead, I’ll just mention a few of the more memorable ideas contained in this collection of silly nonsense.

Don’t expect to make face to face contact with an alien. Aliens don’t ‘exist’ in our ‘reality’.
Sometimes aliens ‘exist’ in our ‘reality’.
How will you know that you’re actually talking to an alien and not just yourself? Well, it doesn’t really matter; aliens are often just our future selves.
Aliens live too far from Earth to actually come down and visit us.
Sometimes aliens come down to visit us.
If we really want to communicate with aliens, the best thing to do is draw pictures and feel good.
Every one of us has already made contact with aliens. In fact, we make contact with aliens on a regular basis. Whenever we enter the ‘theta reality’ we communicate freely with all kinds of entities. The theta reality is basically the state that we exist in between dreaming and waking up.

There were legitimately interesting aspects of this book. I was actually quite impressed with the comprehensive nature of the dogma that the authors are setting down. If you want to hear voices in your head badly enough, you will. The only difficulty with this will be for you to accept that the voices in your head are other than your own. If you manage to convince yourself that these voices are actually aliens, even if they’re only mildly alien versions of yourself, then it’s going to be quite difficult to argue with you; however, although I can’t prove that the voices in your head aren’t aliens, I can avoid you and tell all my mates that you’re a stupid cunt.

This is basically a new-age self help book with a bit of science fiction thrown in to spice it up. (It’s full of the same “let’s enter the next stage of human evolution” crap as Morning of the Magicans and the last chapter of Wilson’s The Occult.) The ideas are utterly moronic, but the author’s aren’t trying to convince their readers to kill themselves; they’re trying to encourage people to get together and be creative and open-minded. It was a shitty experience to read this book, but that’s because it was boring, repetitive and stupid. At least it wasn’t boring, repetitive, stupid and morally reprehensible like a christian self help book. I’ve also watched some videos of Lyssa Royal (skip to 12:50 to get to the summoning bit), and she’s simply too silly to dislike.

This book was written more than 20 years ago, and those 20 years have seen none of its predictions come true. That being said, there’s still people who are into this nonsense. It really does baffle me when I think of how weird and insane the human race can be. It seems that some people feel the need to believe in something greater than themselves, and all things considered, I suppose that telepathic aliens aren’t the lamest available option.

Oh, and just to remind you; there is a facebook page for this blog for anyone that wants to keep updated with all of the newest posts.