100,000 Years of Man’s Unknown History

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100,000 Years of Man’s Unknown History – Robert Charroux
Laffont Special Edition – 1970? (Originally published in French in 1963)
I’m sick of the Evolution versus Creation debate. Anyone with an ounce of sense knows that the human race appeared on Earth millions of year ago after a female alien from the planet Venus came here on vacation, fucked a pig and gave birth to a race of mutants. These mutants were stupider than her, but more intelligent than us, and they were able to understand and replicate some Venusian technology. After Orejona, their mom, went back to Venus, they started misusing this technology and ended up wiping most of their race out in some kind of atomic war (the same war that sank Atlantis). The survivors of this prehistoric nuclear holocaust vowed that they wouldn’t allow anything similar to happen again, so they started secret societies to guard the dangerous Venusian secrets. Many of the most important figures in history were privy to these secrets; it turns out that Moses was actually a nuclear physicist. The pyramids, the Nazca Lines, the Piri Res maps, the Bible and all mythologies provide abundant evidence for these claims.

That is the main idea behind this absolutely glorious book. I bought it as part of a collection (including Chariots of the Gods and Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain) a few years ago, and it had been quietly collecting dust on my shelf until last November. I picked it up on a whim and saw mention of Count Von Küffstein. This seemed odd; why would the elusive Count Von K., homunculator supreme, show up in a book about ancient aliens? Well, this book is a little broader in its scope that other ancient alien books. This one doesn’t focus on presenting evidence for the ancient alien theory; it assumes that the theory is true and uses it to explain the predicament of mankind. The first half of the book, while tremendously silly, follows the semi-coherent narrative of our Venusian ancestors, while the latter half descends into a muddle of chapters on alchemy, cults, nuclear physics, mummies, mutant hybrids, ESP, Satanists, Tunguska, secret societies and time-travel. There’s even a chapter on how successful people “of action and solid character” have smaller colons. If the second half of the book isn’t quite as focused as the first, it is still equally as entertaining.

So how convincing are the arguments put forth in here? Well, to tell the truth, they are not even remotely convincing. (I think I lost my faith in Charroux when, in maybe the first chapter, he described Eliphas Levi as a rationalist.) This book takes a similar approach to Morning of the Magicians, and even pays homage to that steaming pile of garbage. Facts can only get you so far, and like his countrymen Pauwels and Bergier, Robert Charroux is more interested in speculation; he takes that ‘let’s see what we can come up with if we ignore logic for a while’ approach that is frequently adopted by many of the authors that I review. The fundamental premise of the book, the claim that our descendants came from Venus, is slightly problematic. The surface temperature on Venus is nearly 500 degrees Celsius. It has been suggested that life could survive in the clouds that float 50km above the planet’s surface, but those clouds are full of sulphuric acid, so if there was life floating about up there, it would have to be rather different to human life and probably wouldn’t transition well were it to come to Earth. Who knows though, maybe the surface of Venus was very different back when Orejona made her trip.

orejona - venus I don’t think it’s normal to have 10 toes and 8 fingers, and why are they webbed?

Robert Charroux was obviously a bit mental, and like some of the other nutjobs who believed in ancestors from Atlantis, he believed in maintaining racial purity. Apparently his ideas have gone on to play a major role in the development of esoteric Nazism. I’m only after getting a copy of Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival by Joscelyn Godwin this morning, and looking in the back of it now, I can see Charroux’s name in the index and this book in the bibliography. I’m more excited about that than I should be.

Also, when I was reading the wikipedia page on Charroux, I noticed that he had a keen interest in the Rennes-le-Château mystery. I found this particularly intriguing considering his connections with the far-right and my current Grail obsession. I needed more info. There was a reference for a book called Treasures of the World, but on looking up this title, I couldn’t find an online/affordable copy. I put it on my to-buy-eventually list and tried to quell my curiosity by going on a walk. I ended up in the library, and more out of boredom than hope, I looked up Charroux’s name in the library database. Sure enough, they had a copy of Treasures of the World hidden away in the archives. I felt so cool asking the librarian for help accessing it. As we walked through the compact shelving, I imagined the middle-aged lady in a pink blouse who was helping me to be an aged sage dressed in a black robe, leading me into a crypt full of dusty tomes of forbidden lore.

Charroux - treasures of the world Treasures of the World – Robert Charroux
Muller – 1966
I took the book out, but the section on Rennes-le-Château is only a few pages long, and despite Charroux’s proximity to the case (he interviewed the lad who bought the house from the woman who lived with the priest), it only gives the standard pre-Holy Blood, Holy Grail account of Bérenger Saunière’s mysterious wealth. It is pretty cool to see that there was actually a bit of speculation about that whole deal before Lincoln, Baigent and Leigh came along. I don’t have much of an interest in treasure that isn’t linked to mental conspiracy theories though, so I’m not going to read the rest of this book, but I have scanned the section on Saunière for future reference. Email me if you want to see it.

Robert Charroux was a fool, but 100,000 Years of Man’s Unknown History got me excited about reading garbage again. If I see any more of his books for cheap, I’ll definitely be picking them up.

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.

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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

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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!”

Transformation (The Breakthrough) – Whitley Strieber

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Avon – 1989
A few months ago, I reviewed Whitley Strieber’s Communion. I had planned to wait a year or two before reading the sequel, but I was leaving for work the other day and I needed a book for my train ride that would fit in my back pocket. Transformation was the first within reach.

Communion was garbage, and Transformation is worse. At this stage, Strieber is no longer hanging out with Budd Hopkins, and barely considers the possibility that his ‘visitors’ are from outer space. Strieber wants to be seen to be as carrying the cross of every human being who has ever claimed to have had an encounter with the paranormal, and to state that he was abducted by Martians might prevent him from being able to speak on behalf of all those loonies who believe that they have met fairies, elves, or Gods. Instead, Whitley has decided that the visitors are likely trans-dimensional inhabitants of Earth. They may not be from this planet, but nor are they not from this planet.

Strieber was 41 when Communion came out. That means that it contains roughly 40 years worth of abduction experiences. Transformation came out just one year after Communion, and Strieber had only managed to get abducted once or twice during this period. Accordingly, the aliens take a back seat in Transformation; Strieber’s philosophical side is the unwelcome visitor here. 80-85% of this book is taken up with him explaining how he came to terms with his weird experiences. (And in fairness to him, I’m sure it took a lot of effort and time to get over having his hemorrhoidy anal pouch violated by hobgoblins.)

In my review of Communion, I wrote from the perspective of Strieber to give my followers a sense of what reading that book was like. I’ll re-summon Whitley for a bit to give you some more insight into this one.

“I was petrified, but I desperately wanted to let the visitors know that I had accepted my role in their plans and that I was willing to do whatever I could to please them. These strange creatures terrified me, but I understood that this fear was necessary. As time passed, I realized that I was not so much afraid the visitors as I was afraid that they would not be happy with me. This fear had evolved into a combination of uncertainty and isolation. I resolved to do whatever I could to entice the visitors to keep me as one of their subjects. I stopped locking the doors to our cabin, and I began playing with my bum during masturbation (to make it looser for future probing). Ease of access is key when you’re dealing with these sinister, yet magnificent beings.

Once I crossed the threshold of uncertainty, I began to comprehend the visitors’ plan for me. Although the terror and discomfort were difficult to bear, they ultimately made me a stronger, more open person. Perhaps the visitors are so used to crossing boundaries that they do not understand or notice the negative aspects of fear, especially fear of the unknown. I now believe that they intentionally frightened me so that I could ultimately become less frightened. In any case, we must be willing to transcend our emotions if we hope to accompany the visitors into realms of unheralded experience…”
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Although there’s not as many alien encounters in this one, it does include a lengthy section on Strieber’s astral projections. He finds a way to allow his soul to escape from his body in a little bubble, and he uses this bubble to float around his gaff. He also finds a way to appear to people in different parts of the country. He tells of how he would think of a friend and then how that friend would immediately call him and tell him that she had just seen his disembodied head lurking in her bathroom. I’m not even taking the piss; he actually expected people to believe this twoddle.
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More like Twitley Strieber, amirite?

Oh, there’s a bit in here where Strieber claims that Aliens speak Irish. (Well in fairness, he actually says that a different lad named Leonard Keane has made that claim.) Unfortunately, the article that Striebs references was unpublished at the time, and it looks like it has remained unpublished. (I wonder why!) I can’t find any about Keane online either. Keane’s argument is supposedly based on an abductee’s memories of alien speech. The abductee in question was hypnotized and began to spout off the different things that the aliens said to her.

Let’s break this down piece by piece.

1. This is what the abductee claims to have heard: “oh-tookurah bohututahmaw hulah duh duwa maher Duh okaht turaht nuwrlahah tutrah aw hoe hoe marikoto tutrah etrah meekohtutrah etro indra ukreeahlah”

2. Keane claims that this sounds identical to “ua-tuaisceartach beo t-utamail uile dubh dubhach mathair dubh ocaid tuartha nuair lagachar t-uchtarach athbheoite maireachtala-costas t-uachtarach eatramh meancog t-uachtarach eatramh indeachrachlach”

3. If those words were actually pronounced in Irish, they would sound something like this: “oowa-tooishkyartock byoh tootamawl illyeh duv duvock mawher duv uckad toorha noor lagacar tooacktorock awtveeohithye marrocktawllah custos tooacktarock yatriv myancug tooachtarock yatriv indyakracklock”
Compare the two phonetic versions there. Do the sounds match up?

3. The Irish words that Keane heard in the abductee’s rant translate directly as: “descendants of Northern peoples living groping all darkness mournful mother dark occasion forebode when weakness in high places revives cost of living high interval mistakes in high places interval fit for distressing”

4. I’m not sure who was responsible, Keane or Strieber, but somehow that jumble of words was put into the following order: “The living descendants of the Northern peoples are groping in universal darkness. Their mother mourns. A dark occasion forebodes when weakness in high places will revive a high cost of living; an interval of mistakes in high places; and interval fit for distressing events”

What a load of shit…

Leonard Keane’s article was supposed to be called “Keltic Factor Red”; on the off-chance that somebody knows where I could find a copy, please let me know! I want to thank my friend Lorcan for helping me with the Irish phonetics above. I’ll sign off with Lorcan’s message for any of the visitors that might be reading this post;

“Ná cuir aon rud suas mo hole, ET”

The Outer Space Connection – Alan and Sally Landsburg

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Bantam Books – 1975

Well, here we go again; another dumb book about ancient aliens. This one is really bad too. It’s based on the making of a film that was itself based on this book. Does that sound awkward? Yeah, it is. To get the full picture, you really have to watch the movie too. (Don’t worry; it’s online.) The soundtrack is fucking awesome, and the guy from the Twilight Zone does the narration. It turns out that Alan Landsburg worked on Erich Von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods movie (also available online), and it shows. (In fairness, he openly admits that he has been “doing that Von Daniken stuff” at the end of this book.) The writing is laughable at times, it’s written as a first person narrative about the shooting of the film, but it has a real Da Vinci Code feel to it. My favourite line in the book comes at the end of a paragraph discussing the disappearance of the Mayan people:
“Instead, they retreated deeper and deeper into undesirable places, seemingly in fear of contact with any other people. Why, damnit, why?”

So what’s being said in here that isn’t being said in the other stupid books I’ve reviewed on the same topic? Well, this one throws in the idea of cloning as an explanation as to how the aliens managed to get here. To plant the seeds of human life on Earth, the aliens would have to have travelled for hundreds of thousands of years. Cryogenics is ruled out as a means of prolonging life, and so in order for the crew to live through the journey, they would have filled up their spaceship with cannisters of human DNA, their own DNA at that. After a few years, one of the female crew members would impregnate herself with some of this DNA and give birth to a clone of herself. 25 years later, the clone would impregnate herself with yet another clone, and the process would be repeated until the ship finally reached Earth. Simple, right?

Landsburg doesn’t really go into detail on how this would work. Regardless of how large and advanced their ship was, I would imagine that the food supplies would have run out after a few thousand years even if the crew was made up of only a few people. I think the idea hinted at is that there is only one crew member alive at a time. (Quite similar to that movie Moon right?) So presumably the mother would have to sacrifice herself as soon as her clone/daughter was ready to take control of the ship. What would the clone do to the corpse? Well, considering the scarcity of meat aboard that spaceship, I reckon the only sensible thing to do would be to eat the body. Nothing should go to waste in space! Matrophageous spite; autophageous delight!

Ok, so that’s a nice bit of fantastic realism, but is there any evidence for this having happened? Of course there is! Scientists cloning axlotals [sic] found that the cloned versions of this variety of salamander end up with a slightly shorter body than the originals. They are otherwise identical. That interesting fact is noted in one of the first chapters of the book, but its relevance isn’t made apparent until somewhere near the end. After the mention of this crucial piece of information, there are a bunch of chapters on the usual ancient alien garbage, including several discussions of the Mayans and their pyramids. The Mayans are praised as being far more advanced than any other peoples of their era. Mayan skulls with holes in them are presented as proof of their advanced medical skill. They weren’t simply smashing each other’s heads open; they were removing cells from the brain to create clones! But wait a minute; how do we know that the Mayans were creating clones? Well, their skeletal remains suggest that the Mayans were fairly stocky.That is to say that they had shorter than average bodies, JUST LIKE THE CLONED OXLOTALS!!!
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Brain transplants in 2000 BC

There’s tonnes of other crap in here; lots of utter shit about pyramid power and human auras. The stuff on the Bermuda Triangle was pretty cool, but it’s written in an infuriatingly credulous way, just like everything else in this book. There’s also a discussion on Vladmir Demikhov’s experiments on dogs. I had heard of these before, but I’d not watched the footage online. Fuck, it’s absolutely horrible. I guess that’s what Roky Erickson was singing about.

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Pretty sure that’s just a monkey there mate!

I can’t say I’d recommend this book to anyone, but the movie might be enjoyable if you were high on drugs. I myself was not high on drugs when I watched it.

Morning of the Magicians – Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier

Dorset Press – 1988

This one is utterly moronic. I’m no stranger to idiotic books, and I have a fairly high threshold for reading garbage, but this one was seriously stupid. It was made particularly disappointing by the fact that I actually spent quite a while trying to track down an affordable copy. I always knew it was going to be fairly bullshitty, and so I decided that anything more than 15 dollars would be too much. It took me five separate orders over the course of two years to actually get my hands on this thing. Three times the bookseller had already sold their copy and not updated their stock online, and one copy got lost in the post. When this nice hardback edition arrived, I was delighted.

The delight was not to last.

Why was I so determined to own a copy of this book? Well, this one was actually fairly popular when it was published (this edition boasts “Over 800,000 copies sold!” on the back cover), and a lot of the silly ideas in here went on to influence other silly writers. I kept seeing its title pop up in other books and articles. It has been claimed that this is the source for the main concept in Erich Von Däniken’s work. Also, a large part of this book focuses on Nazi occultism, and Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke spends a few pages of his book talking about how fucking stupid this one is. On top of that, I had read that this book was influenced directly by the writings of Lovecraft, and while it is only mentioned briefly in Colin Wilson’s The Occult, it becomes apparent after reading it that it had a pretty big influence on his thinking. I didn’t really have a choice; I had to read this one.

So, the main idea of the book is that human beings are on the brink of the next stage of our mental evolution. Pauwels and Bergier believe that the scientific method has run its course, and any major future developments will be based on something other than logical reasoning. Being sensible is holding us back from reaching our potential. Their idea is to use their imaginations to come up with absurd nonsense, and maybe that nonsense will actually be true. T.C. Lethbridge used this exact approach in his book, the topic of which fits in perfectly with the ideas of Pauwels and Bergier. The authors title this approach ‘Fantastic Realism’. I think another, more accurate, way of describing this approach would be ‘simpletonism’.

They talk about how difficult it will be for the masses to adapt to this new approach. You might find it hard to imagine a modern society radically changing its system of beliefs over a short period of time. The authors’ response to this is ingenious. They claim, ‘ If Nazi Germany did it, we can too!’ Honestly, I think they must have been planning to write two different books and ended up throwing all of their material together to reach a word-count or deadline or something. The Nazi stuff takes up about one third of the book, but its function is limited to serving as a bad example of what the authors want to achieve: a society in which people ignore common-sense and listen to the most mental dopes in all the land.

My favourite part of the book was the authors’ theory on mutants. Pauwels and Bergier believe that while nuclear radiation definitely has negative effects on some people, it probably also has positive effects on others. Sure, it melts some people’s skin off and causes cancer and sterilization, but what’s to say that it doesn’t also create super humans? Back in a few minutes guys, I’m just going to go stick my head in the microwave and become one of the X-men! They give a description of one such super human: “He is now superior to us; his thought no longer plods – it flies… Such a man would have absolutely no interest in trying to communicate with us, nor would he seek to dazzle us by trying to explain the enigmas of light, or the secrets of genes… This man would be above and beyond humanity. He could only communicate to advantage with minds of his own.” I would be surprised if Alan Moore hadn’t based Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen on that specific paragraph.

This book discusses Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, aliens, the Nazis and mutants, so you know that there’s going to be some good stuff in here. Unfortunately, all of the juicy bits are (a) not particularly enlightening and (b) surrounded by pages and pages of wank. It’s a long book, and I was only able to stomach a few pages a day. In fairness though, I probably would have enjoyed it a little more if I hadn’t come across its ideas in so many other texts. It would be a good place to start if you wanted to begin researching the ridiculous and inane. Otherwise, your life is almost definitely going to be better if you don’t read this imbecilic pile of crap. I bought two other books by Pauwels and Bergier before this one actually arrived, but I’m going to give myself a break before I torture myself with them.

I’m going to have nightmares about having to read these.

The Legend of the Sons of God – T.C. Lethbridge

Arkana – 1990

This books contains some of the choiciest bullshit I have ever come across. Did you know that the rocks of Stonehenge are from Tipperary? Were you aware that the craters on the moon are the results of an interstellar nuclear war between the Martians and Venusians? Had it ever occurred to you that Jesus was a ghost alien from the future? I can’t say I had ever wondered about these things before reading this book, but now I am convinced that they are all entirely true.

T.C. Lethbridge doesn’t even bother to present his ideas as fact. He openly admits that the bulk of this book is conjecture. He reminds his reader that there are gaping holes and inconstencies in our accounts of history. The standard scientific approach to solving these mysteries is to use proof and evidence. This method doesn’t quite satisfy Lethbridge though, and he suggests that it would be more productive to make up ridiculous stories and then look around for evidence of the events that we imagined. This book was written by a grown man playing make-believe.

“Although much of what has been written so far is not strictly orthodox, the present chapter is far worse and deals with matters which are fit really only for the television plays called ‘Doctor Who’.” Thus opens the seventh chapter of this masterpiece.

This book came out at roughly the same time as Von Däniken’s Chariot of the Gods, and it contains some similar ideas, but this one is definitely more enjoyable. It’s short, the writing is engaging and the claims herein are silly enough to be thoroughly entertaining. This is a must read.

Chariots of the Gods? and In Search of Ancient Gods by Erich Von Däniken

Chariots of the Gods? – Erich Von Däniken
Laffont / G.P. Putnam’s Sons – 1970

In Search of Ancient Gods – Erich Von Däniken
G.P. Putnam’s Sons – 1973

I believe in aliens. I would be surprised to find out that the only forms of life in the universe exist on this small planet. I even believe it likely that life on Earth originated elsewhere in the universe. I haven’t seen any evidence to the contrary.

Erich Von Däniken believes that an alien civilization came to earth thousands of years ago with the aim of speeding up human development. Apparently Quetzalcoatl, Odin, Zeus, the Burning Bush, and all of the other gods of ancient mythology are members of this band of galactic Samaritans.

Some of the theories in this book are interesting, but the reasoning that Däniken uses is so incredibly bad that he discredits his own work. The first vision of Ezekiel (Ezekiel 1:4) is analyzed in both of these books. Now, Ezekiel is one of the more ‘out-there’ prophets in the old testament; early in his narrative, he has a vision of God floating down to Earth in what Däniken very reasonably refers to as a spaceship. Däniken also makes the reasonable point that if God were truly omnipotent, that he would not have to arrive from the North as he does in Ezekiel: if he were truly omnipotent, he should have been able to instantaneously appear. Even devout Christians must admit that even God can’t do what he can’t do, and I think that if you’re willing to believe in Ezekiel’s vision at all, that you must accept that the God that therein appears is in fact an alien. Now this reasoning should be convincing to believers of the Old Testament, but people with any shred of intelligence won’t really care if the Bible contains aliens. Well, in order to convince non-believers, Däniken actually dismisses the story of Ezekiel and other myths as mere exaggerations of real life UFO encounters. On one hand he is saying that we should believe in aliens because they appear in our mythologies, but on the other hand he is saying that myths are not to be trusted as they are full of exaggeration. According to Däniken, we should only trust the parts of ancient stories that suggest that aliens were once our overlords.

These are two different books that cover largely the same material. Chariots of the Gods? was Däniken’s first book. It seems that some newer versions of the book have dropped the question mark in the title. I find this unfortunate for comedic reasons; every time I see the title I imagine it being read aloud by Ron Burgundy. The other book, In Search of Ancient Gods, has no question mark in the title, but it does have the aptly descriptive subtitle; ‘My Pictorial Evidence for the Impossible’. This one was published a few years after the first one, and it’s almost the exact same content, just with more pictures. Some of the pictures in here are truly bizarre, and they’re far more unsettling than any of Däniken’s writing. This book also has a cool little alien man embossed on the front cover:

Both of these books are ridiculous. They’re not remotely convincing, but they did make me think. I really like reading writer’s predictions for a future that is now past. Däniken believed humans would have reached Mars by 1986. I don’t hold that against him though; if we focused our attention on space travel rather than on killing each other, we might well have reached Mars already. He also imagines the rather futuristic notion of a series of computers in different cities around the world being able to store information and send it to each other! Overall, I’ll give these books a 5.5/10. They were dumb, but they were interesting enough to finish. The film version of Chariots of the Gods refers to to book it was based on as a novel, and I think that reading these books as novels is a good idea. They’re good as science fiction, but shit as science.

I really want to visit Erich Von Däniken’s theme park.