UFOs and the Alien Agenda – Bob Larson

UFOs and the alien agenda bob larson UFOs and the Alien Agenda – Bob Larson
Thomas Nelson Publishers- 1997

Some of the books I have read about aliens approached the topic from a rational, scientific point of view. Others looked at this phenomenon through a less critical lens. I preferred reviewing the latter because I had more to make fun of. It’s harder to argue with a person when they’re using evidence and mathematics to make their point than it is when the author’s information comes from an alien that intermittently possesses their body and claims to be Jesus Christ.

Having studied both sides of the debate, that of the scientists and that of the new-age gurus, I needed another perspective. Where better to look than my old friend, Bob Larson? bob larson walking turd

Bob, as you should well know, is an Evangelical exorcist who has made his living preaching about the evils of rock music and extorting money from the vulnerable. Well guess what folks! In 1997, he made a breakthrough. The Devil isn’t only to be found on MTV; he’s also been riding around Earth in a flying saucer for the last 70 years! That’s right. Aliens, much like everything else that Bob Larson doesn’t like, are the Devil!

This book was quite a strange read in comparison to the other books I’ve read about aliens. If you imagine the skeptical, rational books about aliens to be a psychiatrist, the nutty new age books will appear as the patient, struggling to come to terms with what they’ve witnessed. If we carry this metaphor one step further, Bob Larson will appear as an escaped lunatic who has rushed into the psychiatrist’s office and is attempting to make both psychiatrist and patient smell his magical brown finger.

scientists are witches Scientists are heretical witches.

Larson uses science to dismiss some of the claims of abductees and believers, but he’s quick to dismiss science based facts as ridiculous when they don’t fit into his own worldview. At the same time, he’s completely willing to accept some of the crazier claims of the alien channelers because the Bible accepts spiritual possession as objectively real. Instead of coming down on one side of the argument, he forms his own, completely ridiculous, conclusion.

Ever since the late 1940s, the Devil has been using mainstream media to familiarize the world with the concept of a non-hostile alien invasion of Earth. The beings we refer to as aliens are objectively real, but they are actually evil spirits from another dimension, not visitors from a different planet. The Bible doesn’t mention life on other planets, so we can safely assume that all notions of extraterrestrial life are misleading and Satanic. Aliens are really just demons in spacesuits. After the rapture, when the physical bodies of all good Christians ascend to heaven without trace, the evil “aliens” will land and take over the world. The remaining humans will welcome their new Satanic overlords. With no Christians around to realise what’s really happening, these demonic aliens will lead the remaining population of the Earth into a new age of Occultism and sin. This will allow the Antichrist, doubtlessly another alien, to assume control and bring about the end of the world.

You probably got about halfway through that last paragraph before rolling your eyes and skipping to this bit. No. Go back and read it. Let it soak in.

I mean, I think that’s a fucking cool idea, but let’s be honest; there’s a few plot holes. Also, was the plan to saturate mass media with stories about aliens orchestrated by a group of Satanists or did it happen by chance? Satan works in mysterious ways.

My favourite part of the book was when Larson described his meeting with Whitley Strieber on the set of the Oprah Winfrey show. Strieber is a frustratingly gullible new-age conspiracist and alien abductee. A large portion of the last review I wrote of one of his books was spent comparing reading the book to drowning in a river of diarrhea. Strieber is a very stupid man. Imagine my surprise on reading about an exchange in which he comes across as the voice of reason. Imagine my delight on reading Larson’s conclusion that Strieber was guilty of being a witch. This is wonderfully silly stuff.

clever devil So crop circles were originally human pranks, but then the Devil saw them and thought they were cool, so he did them too.

There were moments when the depth of Larson’s research surprised me a little, but always more surprising were his bizarre conclusions. Ol’ Bob is a crazy, dangerous man who makes money from exploiting people’s fears. A vile human being.
bob larson crayon

Black Sun – Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke

black sun nicholas goodrick-clarke
Black Sun (Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity) – Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke
New York University Press – 2002
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s The Occult Roots of Nazism was one of the first books I reviewed on this blog. It was a good book, but I remember being mildly disappointed with the type of occultism I was encountering in it. I had read stuff on the internet about Satanic Nazis and Hitler’s UFO fleet, but this book was about Theosophy and Runes. The author had written a book about the actual Occult roots of Nazism and confined the silly conspiracies that developed after the war to a short discussion at the end of the book.

Black Sun, published 17 years after The Occult Roots of Nazism, is the same author’s account of the neo-Nazi conspiracies and ideologies that arose after WWII. They are mind-bogglingly insane. Featuring folks who think Hitler was a manifestation of God, groups who think that “the Jews” are an evil alien race that have willfully displaced the real Hebrews (who are actually the Aryans), and more flying saucers than you can shake a stick at, this book is overflowing with insanity.

esoteric hitlerism serrano This dude has Swasti-chakras on his ass.

Unlike many of the books about insane topics that are reviewed on this site, Black Sun is actually a well written and researched piece of work. Goodrick-Clarke explains the theories; he does not espouse them. Another crucial difference between this book and most of the others I review is that the ideas contained in here are not just bizarre; they are vile, hateful and extremely dangerous. While the material is off-the-wall and genuinely fascinating, this book will probably leave you feeling worried and uncomfortable. After a detailed look at various racist organizations and the ways in which these groups rationalize and manifest their hate, the book ends with this chilling sentence:

From the retrospective viewpoint of a potential authoritarian future in 2020 or
2030, these Aryan cults and esoteric Nazism may be documented as early
symptoms of major divisive changes in our present-day Western democracies.

donald trump

I try not to get overly political on this blog, and I know that lots of Trump supporters will probably roll their eyes at this allusion, but here is a video of one of the hate groups described in Black Sun campaigning for Trump’s election. I don’t believe that all Trump supporters are neo-Nazis, but the amount of neo-Nazis that support the current president of the United States should be concerning to everyone. If this book had been written 15 years later, it doubtlessly would have had a chapter on the alt-right and the Cult of Kek.

I’m planning another post that will discuss some of the specific issues that come up in this book, so I’ll leave this post quite short. Black Sun is definitely one of the best non-fiction books I’ve reviewed, and I don’t need to pick it apart like I normally do. I strongly recommend reading it for yourself. I was fascinated to read about the lengths that neo-Nazis have to go through to rationalize their hate. Hating a person because you believe that they’re the descendant of an evil satanic alien is far sillier than hating them because you’re not used to how they look and speak and because you’re afraid that they might take your stuff. If you’re going to be a racist piece of shit, at least be honest with yourself.

Breakthrough – Whitley Strieber

Picture this:
You enjoyed last night’s chili so much that you had two large bowls. Now it’s the morning after and you’re straddling the toilet, aware that an eruption of Vesuvian proportions is imminent. Whooosh! The intensity of the shitflow is equal parts relieving and violent – it takes about 6 seconds for your anus to dispel what took you 20 minutes to eat only hours earlier.

Now imagine a gigantic ass shitting with that intensity for a prolonged period of time. Somehow the being this ass belongs to has an infinite reservoir of rancid, hot, soupy crap feeding the flow of their disgustingly stretched and overworked anus. Their high pressure fountain of fluid feces is pointed directly at your mouth. Try as you might to avoid them, the diarrheic rapids find their way into your maw, rebounding against the back of your throat and sending squirts of wet shit out each of your nostrils. You are drowning in dysentery, yet you remain alive.

That’s what reading this book feels like.

breakthrough - whitley strieber

Breakthrough (The Next Step) – Whitley Strieber
Harper Collins – 1995
I reviewed the second entry in Strieber’s visitors series only 3 months after reviewing the first, but it took me almost 2 and a half years to pluck up the courage to move on to Breakthrough, the 3rd entry in the series. By no means did I think that Communion was a good book, but Transformation was definitely worse, and I knew that any further forays into Strieber’s silly nonsense would prove to be absolutely terrible. I was right.

This book really is difficult to read. Strieber included his most interesting abduction experiences in Communion, and Breakthrough is just the continued coming to terms with having had aliens probe his rotten shitbag that Whitley started in Transformation. There’s very little alien activity being described in here; it’s nearly all speculation on the nature of the relationship that Strieber thinks the aliens want to have with us. He thinks they want to open our eyes to new levels of consciousness and understanding. This is getting closer and closer to that new-agey garbage in books like You Are Becoming a Galactic Human.

Highlights of this book included the description of the smelly goblin that lived in Strieber’s house for a month, Strieber’s astral voyage to the literal Garden of Eden, and the sin spiders that appeared above his bed. I really doubt that Strieber believes his own bullshit. These are just bad dreams he had or ideas he came up with on the toilet. At one stage he describes an experience in which he and a friend drive through an alternate dimension, an idea that I am certain he plagiarized from Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut, a short story by Stephen King. (If you’re interested in this comparison, the incident occurs in Chapter 11, page 139 in my edition, and King’s story is in Skeleton Crew.) Strieber puts little effort or care into making his story believable because his audience is mostly made up of low-grade-imbeciles.

All in all, this is a remarkably atrocious book.

whitley strieber visitors
I have The Secret School, the 4th book in Strieber’s visitors series, but after this, I don’t know if I’ll ever read it. This series is terrible, awful rubbish.

Are We Alone? We Are Not Alone.

are we alone we are not alone
These books are a little different to the books about aliens that I have previously reviewed. They are not books by/about alien abductees, books about people that can channel messages from alien entities, books about ancient aliens nor books about the UFO phenomenon. No, these two books attempt to use science and mathematics to work out if there is other life in the universe and if we will ever encounter it. BORING!

Are We Alone? – Robert T. Rood & James S. Trefil
Scribners – 1981

trefil and rood Professors Rood and Trefil, two handsome hunks.

Are We Alone? focuses on the Drake Equation and its variables. I’m not much of a math/science guy, so I’m just going to quote directly from the Drake Equation’s wikipedia entry to explain it.

The Drake equation is a probabilistic argument used to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy. The number of such civilizations N, is assumed to be equal to the mathematical product of

R, the average rate of star formations, in our galaxy,

fp, the fraction of formed stars that have planets,

ne for stars that have planets, the average number of planets that can potentially support life,

fl, the fraction of those planets that actually develop life,

fi, the fraction of planets bearing life on which intelligent, civilized life, has developed,

fc, the fraction of these civilizations that have developed communications, i.e., technologies that release detectable signs into space, and

L, the length of time over which such civilizations release detectable signals,

for a combined expression of:

N = R x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc x L

The authors devote a chapter to calculate the range (from optimistic to pessimistic) of values for each variable. This book was far more academic than I wanted it to be, and I didn’t understand a lot of what the authors were talking about. I found myself skimming through large sections. Rood and Trefil conclude that while not impossible, it is highly, highly unlikely that our galaxy houses other forms of intelligent life. This book was boring as hell, but I don’t think it was bullshit.

We Are Not Alone – Walter Sullivan
Laffont Special Edition – 1970? (originally published 1964)

Despite its title, We Are Not Alone was written before Are We Alone? It’s a little broader in its scope, providing a fairly detailed history of astronomy and discussing potential implications of contact with an alien race, but the focus here is largely the same. Written before man walked on the moon, the science in this one is probably quite dated – I’m assuming that there have since been breakthroughs in astronomy that affect the calculations and speculation herein, but the author was a well respected science journalist, and he doesn’t seem like a huge bullshitter. He concludes that it is very likely that intelligent alien life exists elsewhere in the universe.

Sullivan discusses some interesting points about religion and contact with aliens. Could other planets be home to creatures that never fell from grace with God? Is there Gardens of Eden on strange distant lands? Did God separate us because one race had fallen further than another? Can we use technology to spread the word of Christ through the Cosmos? What if visitors to Earth are religious missionaries, spreading a bizarre alien faith? All pretty interesting ideas. There was also a chapter on meteorites, and it made me think of Jordy Verrell.

Sullivan reckoned that aliens are out there. Rood and Trefil say that we’re probably alone. Neither provides any definitive conclusions, and as far as I know, as of 2018, we’re not much closer to determining whether we are alone in the universe or not. Personally, I still have my fingers crossed that an Independence Day style invasion is approaching. I assume that tyrannical Alien overlords would do a better job of running this planet than the idiots we’ve chosen for the job.

independence day

Both of these books were a little sciencey for my tastes. I’ll try to stick with books about aliens written by/for gullible idiots in the future.

Space Gate, The Veil Removed – Gyeorgos Ceres Hatonn

In 2016, I tried to read a few books by people who had channeled aliens. I finished one and got a few chapters into another before giving up. These books were so terribly stupid that I afterwards stopped reading books about aliens altogether. One morning last week though, I was looking for something to read on the bus to work and I grabbed this curious text that I had bought at a library book-sale a few years ago. I had an idea that it’d be more of the same, but this one actually turned out to be a bit more mental.

space gate hatonn dharma Space Gate The Veil Removed – Gyeorgos Ceres Hatonn/Dharma
America West Publishing – 1989

This is a book of messages from an alien named Gyeorgos Ceres Hatonn that were recorded (Hatonn doesn’t like the word “channeled” – more on that later) through a medium named Dharma. Like the other books of this nature that I’ve read, these alien messages concern the salvation of the human race. Unlike those other books, this one mixes in some New World Order conspiracy theories. Think Alex Jones meets Bashar.

Ok, let’s try to sum up Hatonn’s message:

Satanic aliens (actually led by Lucifer himself) came to earth in the 40s. They told the US government that they were here because their own planet was in trouble and they needed help from us. That was obviously a lie though – any race capable of interplanetary travel would be more capable of taking care of their own race than we are. These Satanic aliens were obviously up to something shady. The US government understood their own weapons and defense systems would be incomparable to anything developed by this alien race so they acquiesced to all of the aliens’ demands and allowed them to create underground bunkers on US territory (many of which lie under Native Americans’ land). The Bilderburg Group was created to prevent this information from going public. Relations between aliens and government haven’t always been good. Government scientists have been killed in their dozens when the aliens start acting up.

The Cold War was just a hoax so that the Russian and US governments and the aliens could generate money to fund their evil schemes. By 1962, there were colonies on the dark side of the Moon and Mars. (There are plants and lakes and ponds on the Moon, and there’s no difference between its gravity and the Earth’s.) These colonies are for a few select Globalists to go to when the Earth is destroyed. The government and aliens have several concentration camps in the US that serve to train slaves for the Global elite that will rule the Mars and Moon colonies. The US government has signed a deal with the bad aliens allowing them to abduct as many US citizens as they like as long as these people are not physically harmed. JFK was assassinated because he threatened to expose these evil plans. To this day, the CIA murder anyone who attempts to go public with this info. The current US president doesn’t know the extent of the conspiracy

A race of good aliens, commanded by Jesus Christ, has also come to earth to save us from climate change and the bad aliens. (They aren’t too hopeful about our future though, and they have already planned to take over the planet if we all die.) These good aliens have come to earth in the past to use their magic rays to stop the earth from spinning off its axis. Although we are not attacking the bad aliens that live under the desert, we have shot down several of Alien-Jesus’s crafts even thought they have repeatedly offered to help us avoid the oncoming apocalypse. The government refuses to communicate with these good aliens.

The American government is in league with the bad aliens. but it’s also plotting against them. Some of the modern weapons developed by the US government are obviously designed to kill these aliens, but the US is still afraid to use them. In an attempt to cover up their aims of killing the earth dwelling aliens, the US government has entangled itself in a disastrous web of deliberately ridiculous foreign policy – this way they can use earthbound political enemies as an excuse for building these devastating new weapons.

The 3^rd secret of Fatima was about the coming of Antichrist. It stated that most of humanity would die between 1999 and 2003. Jesus would return in 2011 during the apocalypse. The good aliens confirm this. They will come to Earth to take the true believers to another planet.

The New World Order (a coalition of the American, Russian and Alien governments) created AIDs to keep the population down. Social welfare was created to create a nonworking class that would be more likely to take drugs – drugs that George Bush and the CIA could sell to them for profit. These drugs and the resultant misery would intentionally lead to school shootings – another good way of decreasing the population.

All UFO groups are run by alien agents of disinformation, probably aliens themselves.

Ok. You’re still with me? If that was confusing and contradictory, don’t blame me. I assure you, my account of the message of this book is actually far, far easier to understand than the book itself. (If you want to read the original text for yourself, it’s available in a free pdf here.)

The previous owner of my copy of the book was clearly as mad as its author. Check out the notes they took while reading through this crap. I made some notes while I was reading it too, but I intentionally left them on a bus afterwards in the hopes that somebody would find them and get woke.

The book also includes several appendices, most of which are messages from Jesus Christ. The content of these is fairly boring, and it seems that Jesus is a bit of a retard.

photograph of jesus An actual photograph of the 9 and half foot, alien Jesus.

The book is very clear and direct about one thing, the means by which it was delivered. “It comes forth in dictated format from myself [Hatonn] to one of my transreceivers (recorder). There is nothing of “channeling” about it – it is via actual radio type short wave directly from my source into a receiver terminal. No hocus pocus nor mystical hoopla. The recorder does exactly that — records.”

So, according to the entities dictating this book, the words of these messages are very much their own. They are not Dharma’s translation or interpretation of these words. These are the words that Jesus and Hatonn have deliberately and specifically chosen. This is a bit confusing.
poor grammar alien jesus Jesus speaks in a cringe-worthy version King James Bible English. Why would an alien talk like this? The actual Jesus spoke Aramaic, not early modern English.

The person who wrote this book clearly had mental health problems. The muddled, unfocused nature of the writing, along with the content make that pretty clear. The author of this book displays all of the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia.

It turns out that this is just one entry of the Phoenix Journals. There are many more books in this series. As far as I know, all are available online. I might read another one some day, but then again, I might not.
hatonn dharma screenshot
A google image search reveals the extent of this madness. I can’t decide which to read next, AIDS: The Last Great Plague, Marching to Zion, or The Trillion Dollar Lie: The Holocaust… they all sound so appealing.

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.

Year in Review: 2016

2016 is very nearly over, and although it was a tremendously shit year in a lot of ways, it was a pretty good year for this blog. Not only did the site’s traffic increase to 4 times what it was in 2015, I also believe that my content has improved in quality. For much of the first year of the blog, I was reviewing books that I had read a long time ago. At this stage, I’m reviewing books right after reading them, and the more I read on these topics, the more links I have been able to draw. Not every post on here is groundbreaking, but there have been a few this year that I am quite proud of. Here’s my top-10 list for 2016:

bulwer-green-skull

10. The Haunters and the Haunted
A look at the different versions of Bulwer Lytton’s classic ghost story. This post features Colin Wilson getting pwned.

9. The Books of Whitley Strieber
(Communion, Transformation)
I want to bully this guy so much.

witchcraft

8. Seabrook’s Witchcraft
Willie Seabrook: explorer, sceptic, sorceror and sex-pervert. My hero.

buk

7. Matthew Hopkins’ Discovery of Witches
The coolest physical book in my collection

dictionaries-of-witchcraft-and-demonology

6. Dictionary of Demonology/Dictionary of Witchcraft
The biggest disappointment of 2016

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5. The Fiery Angel
A curious, Russian occult novel that turned out to be based on a true story.

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4. Black Magic Grimoires
An in-depth look at some of the most infamous works of black magic.

demoniality-liseux-version

3. Ludovico Maria Sinistrari (Part 1, Part 2)
A weird Friar who believed in randy fairies and gander-neck appendages that grew from between the legs of horny women.

frontispiece

2. Varney the Vampire
You won’t find many reviews of this book that are as thorough as this one.

bookwith angel

and finally… 1. Michelle Remembers
My post of the year without doubt. An on-site investigation into the diabolic, incestuous rape fantasies of a masochistic idiot and sex fiend.

I want to stress that this is a list of the best posts from this blog in 2016. (It most certainly does not reflect the 10 best books that I read in 2016!) I hope that Nocturnal Revelries has been insightful and entertaining to the people who have found themselves reading through it over the last year. I have really enjoyed reading and writing for this blog, and I intend to keep the content coming during 2017. That being said, my wife and I are expecting our first baby in March, and I imagine that she’s going to leave me with significantly less time to spend reading.

Thanks for all of the support. Read books, drink tea, skip mass and have a good new year!

(Oh, and just in case you didn’t know, I have facebook, twitter and tumblr pages set up so that you can keep track of what’s happening on the blog even if you don’t have a wordpress account.)

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!”

Unseen Beings, Unseen Worlds – Tom Dongo

Hummingbird Publishing – 1994

This is a real piece of work. Somewhere in the introduction or the first chapter, Tom Dongo claims to be an extremely skeptical individual who is unwilling to accept anything that he hasn’t been able to prove to himself. He then goes on to write a book about his personal experiences with remote-viewing, aliens, the astral plane, demons, telepathy, reptilians, ghosts, channeling, and banshees. One has to wonder what counts as proof in his mind.

I’ve read lots of books about stupid topics that were written by what seemed to be relatively intelligent authors. (I would have imagined that the sillier the topic, the smarter the author would have to be to convince a publisher to put out their work.) Take Preparing for Contact as an example. It is utterly stupid, but the author managed to sculpt all of that stupid into an impressively cohesive whole. Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain is a truly moronic nightmare, but the authors had clearly done a huge amount of scholarly research. Unseen Beings, Unseen Worlds lacks any traces of cohesion or intelligence. The author is an ignorant, arrogant fool of a man who has absolutely no ability to make sense. This is proof that anyone can write a book; it’s just a bunch of ridiculous ideas that popped into the head of a stupid weirdo.

Ned Flanders… Wait, sorry, I mean Tom Dongo

Mr. Diddleyongo is of the opinion that many cases of mental illness are actually just cases of possession. He believes wholeheartedly in leprechauns. He claims that he can leave his body and travel around the universe. He often talks to spirits from different planets and dimensions. The man is a fucking imbecile.

Imbecile he may be, but stupidity isn’t a crime; the really irritating thing about Tom is the way that he talks about himself. He’s a know-it-all plonker. But, this isn’t really a book about the paranormal; it’s a book about Tom Dongo’s imagination. The ironic, and perhaps most infuriating, thing about this piece of rubbish is that the second chapter begins with the sentence; “I think I have read or am aware of just about every paranormal, esoteric, spiritual, and metaphysical book in print and many that are out of print.” The arrogance of that statement really put me in a foul mood when I read it. I would imagine that Tom’s reading was probably limited to whatever books were on the paranormal shelf in his local library.

I was going to go on and talk more trash about Tom Dongo, but after some consideration, I have concluded that he probably has some kind of mental impairment, and so it’s not really fair to make fun of him. I don’t think that a healthy, normal person would be willing to publish anything this cringe-worthy and idiotic.

My copy is signed by the author too! Aren’t you jealous?