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.

Staring at Goats

men who stare at goats jon ronson The Men Who Stare at Goats – Jon Ronson
Simon & Schuster – 2004

I saw the Men Who Stare at Goats movie when it came out in the cinema. I remember being a bit disappointed by it. A few years later, I watched Crazy Rulers of the World, the documentary series (part 1, part 2, part 3) that was meant to accompany the book on which the movie was based. I loved it. I don’t know why or how I only got around to reading the book last Saturday, but when I did sit down with it, I enjoyed every page.

This book is far more modern (and popular) than a lot of the books that I review here, so a detailed summary is unnecessary. Suffice to say that it’s a book about secret experiments, projects and forays into the paranormal that went on in the US army and CIA. It touches on remote viewing, telekinesis, UFOs, Project MK Ultra, and the Heaven’s Gate cult. Ronson’s writing style is enjoyable and makes the whole thing very easy to digest.

The only real criticism I have of the book has to do with the suggestion that the forms of sonic torture used during WACO and the American invasion of Iraq had been derived from the ideas of Jim Channon. In the late 1970s, Channon, the leader of the First Earth Battalion (more on them later), had suggested blasting enemies with loud, unpleasant music to disorientate them. A sizable portion of Ronson’s book explores the potential link between Channon’s ideas and American soldiers’ use of music to torture terror suspects. I suppose it’s not impossible that there was an indirect link between Channon’s ideas and the atrocities committed in Iraq, but I think it’s far more likely that these soldiers had the idea of blasting prisoners with horrible music completely independently of Channon. Playing loud music to annoy people is hardly a revolutionary idea. Also, I’m not convinced that soldiers playing Matchbox 20 in both Iraq and Guantanamo Bay was anything more than coincidence.

jim channon audio spectrum Channon’s arsenal of auditory weapons.

The section on music as torture provides a necessary bridge to the latter part of the book, and things would probably seem a bit disjointed without it. I’m willing to forgive Ronson for including it because it’s an interesting topic even if his conclusions aren’t convincing, and the stuff that appears both before and after this section is fascinating.

After reading the entire book on the Saturday. I spent my Sunday rewatching the documentary series that went along with it. This series covers much of the same material as the book, but there’s enough exclusive information in both to warrant doing both. I did not rewatch the movie, and I don’t think I’ll bother. There’s sections in both Ronson’s documentary series and book on Frank Olsen and the C.I.A., LSD, suicide/murder conspiracy. I’m currently about half way through Wormwood, the new Netflix documentary series about the Olsen case. It’s pretty good.

cia manual trickery and deception The Official C.I.A. Manual of Trickery and Deception – John Mulholland, H. Keith Melton and Robert Wallace
William Morrow Paperbacks – 2010

While waiting for the call on my library hold on The Men who Stare at Goats, I picked up a book that I bought at a library book sale last year for 50 cents. This is the C.I.A. manual of Trickery and Deception. In the 50s, as part of their infamous MKUltra, mind control program, the C.I.A. hired John Mulholland, a famous stage magician, to write a manual to teach their agents how to use sleight of hand to slip poison into an enemy’s drink. It was believed that all copies of this manual had been destroyed, but Melton and Wallace found a copy in 2007. The introduction section was fairly interesting, but I have to be honest, I gave up on the actual manual part about half-way through. The text is painstakingly boring, and the information it contains is really only going to be useful for date-rapists.

first earth battalion army of light

First Earth Battalion Manual – Jim Channon
Unknown Publisher (US Military?) – 1979ish

I’ve already mentioned the First Earth Battalion. The F.E.B. was a proposed army of superhumans that would be capable of transforming both warfare and human existence. It was imagined by Jim Channon, a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel. According to Ronson, the pentagon paid this guy to spend two years visiting a bunch of new-age institutions and groups in California in the late 70s as part of an attempt to gather ideas to reinvigorate the US army. At the end of these two years, Channon published a manual wherein he described the soldiers of the future as warrior monks, capable of levitation, walking through walls, and cleansing the colon at will. This manual is extensively featured in Ronson’s documentary and quoted from in his book. I knew I’d have to track down a copy.

Doing so was a little more complicated than I anticipated. The first result of a google search for “first earth battalion pdf” looks promising, but I’m not sure it’s the exact document that Ronson was referring to. “The First Earth Battalion Field Manual” (FEB-A from hereon-in) contains lots of the information and images that the featured text contains, but it omits the parts about the different abilities available to various levels of Warrior monks. This document is from 1982. There is another document floating around the net under the title of “First Earth Battalion Manual” (let’s call it FEB-B) but aside from a few pages of new information, this text is mostly the same as FEB-A. It also omits the details of the different levels of Warrior Monks. I think that this one, the shorter pdf, was the text presented to the Delta Force think tank in 1983, but I can’t be sure of this.

warrior monk abilities Some of the abilities of a Warrior Monk, as listed in First Earth Battalion – Evolutionary Tactics Manual (FEB-C), as seen in part 1 of Crazy Rulers of the World.

As far as I can tell, the text that Ronson was looking at was a slightly different document to the ones that I have seen. This third document (FEB-C), I believe, was called “First Earth Battalion Evolutionary Tactics Manual”. NewEarthArmy.com, Jim Channon’s website (or at least a website about him) is marketing a pdf version of this text with the following blurb:

“Evolutionary Tactics is the First Earth Battalion’s Field Manual. As seen in the movie The Men Who Stare at Goats, the manual was created by Jim Channon for the U.S. Army and first published in 1978. It illustrates high performance concepts and evolutionary ideas. Originally passed on officer-to-officer via photocopy, it has since become something of a collector’s item.

Now you can obtain a rare copy of this manual. Its 150 pages are filled with curious artistic renderings, cartoons, and out-of-the-ordinary ideas.”

At 150 pages, this text (FEB-C) is quite a bit longer than the ones available for free (FEB-A and FEB-B), so I am guessing it contains the missing sections. Unfortunately, I can find no free pdf versions of this text online.

The ambiguity over which text is the original and the omission of certain sections in the free pdfs is perhaps explained by the fact that the original text was largely distributed by photocopying. After having read through the free version online, I have absolutely no curiosity or desire to see the unexpurgated text. The 100+ pages of this malarky that I did read were quite sufficient.

unity through diversity Vomit.

This is really very silly stuff. At one point, Channon claims that it is possible that the human race is transforming from a carbon based lifeform to a silicon based lifeform. It reminded me of those horrible new-age alien books that I read/tried to read a few years ago.

Also, having read through this rubbish and researched Channon a bit more, I am rather confused as to the official status of this material. Ronson’s work seems to present it as if it were endorsed by the military, but I can’t find any evidence of this online. The fact that it was distributed through photocopying also suggests that it was never an official army document. That the military gave him money to research this stuff is surprising enough, but I find it very difficult to believe that they would play an active role in publishing this rubbish after having seen it.

Jim Channon died last September, but nobody has updated his wikipedia page yet. He was a bit loopy, but seemed nice enough. RIP Jim.

Reading through all of this stuff, I couldn’t help but think of the X-Files. There’s no evidence that any of the US military’s experiments into the paranormal yielded any positive results, but these texts confirm that US defense and security forces have long been involved in shady, conspiratorial and sometimes mental activities.

The Unknown Origins of the Nine Unknown Men

talbot mundy nine unknown The Nine Unknown – Talbot Mundy
1923

This is a 1923 adventure novel by Talbot Mundy. It’s a moderately entertaining read, but the writing is surprisingly heavy for a work that was originally serialized in Adventure Magazine. It has the kind of plot that makes you want to read quickly, but the writing is so dense that you can’t really skim through it. The frustratingly large cast of characters is made up of protagonists from Mundy’s other works, and as I haven’t read anything else by Mundy, I repeatedly found myself having to consult the first chapter in order to figure out who was who. By the end of the novel I had figured out that the team of good guys consists of a Sikh, a Muslim (with several interchangeable sons), a Christian priest, a strange Indian man and four white guys. The white guys are the heroes from other books by Mundy. I’m sure his fans would have loved this crossover, but I could barely tell these lads apart.

This dream team was assembled by the priest to help attain a mysterious set of books that contain some terrible knowledge. These books are kept by a very secretive and mysterious secret society known as the Nine Unknown or the Nine Unknown Men. The priest intends to burn the books as soon as he gets his hands on them in order to keep the public from ever reading their secrets. Naturally enough, the Nine Unknown don’t want to let this happen. (I found the priest’s name, Father Cyprian, quite intriguing; Saint Cyprian of Antioch was an alleged sorcerer and author of several grimoires. Can we be sure that he really wants to burn these books?).

Also thrown into the mix are a fake Nine. These impostors share the protagonists’ goal of attaining the books, but they want to do so for their own benefit. These lads are trained killers and hypnotists and cause some serious problems for the good guys (and the original Nine, who actually seem pretty chill once you get to know them). Fires, jailbreaks, trips to a brothel, talking corpses, unruly mobs and vicious battles ensue.

Ok, so an adventure novel about a secret society and a set of mysterious books that features hypnotism and chatty corpses sounds like the kind of thing that you’d expect to find reviewed on this blog. However, the really interesting thing about this novel is not the text itself but the conspiracy theory that grew out of it. You see, there are people out there who have come to believe in the literal existence of the Nine Unknown.

The internet is full of confused references to this book and the conspiracy theories it inspired. Most depict that the Nine as guardians of society, withholding dangerous information about nuclear physics to protect humanity from itself. This much is revealed or at least suggested by the end of the novel. But you’ll find many websites that claim that Mundy’s novel mentions the specific topics of the forbidden books being sought by Father Cyprian. The topics of the nine forbidden tomes are supposedly propaganda, physiology, microbiology, the transmutation of metals, communication (both terrestrial and extra-terrestrial), gravitation, cosmogony, light and sociology.
9 unknown ancient origins
(From Ancient-Origins.net)
You see, the problem here is that the topics of the books are never given in Mundy’s novel. Like many of the best conspiracy theories, this idea has its origin in Pauwels and Bergier’s Morning of the Magicians. While the two Frenchmen don’t actually claim that the list comes from Mundy’s novel, the passage in question (or at least the translation of this passage) certainly makes it seem like Mundy had given the list. The supposed topics of the Nine books are almost definitely of P+B’s invention. Also, in the passage in question, they quote Mundy, and although I am working with a translation (presumably of a translation), the quote is not to be found in The Nine Unknown. Looking up the quote online only brings up links to Pauwels and Bergier’s text. I’m not entirely convinced that Pauwels and Bergier made up the quote, but given the rest of their body of work, it really wouldn’t surprise me if they had.

Aside from Mundy, Pauwels and Bergier’s only other source on this topic is Louis Jacolliot, a man whose ideas of Agartha, a city in the centre of the world, I have previously come across in Arktos. (Arktos is a wonderful book, but it’s basically a compilation of some of the worlds craziest conspiracy theories. Unsurprisingly, it contains many references to the work of Pauwels and Bergier. It also contains several references to Om, another novel by Mundy.) P+B say of him; “Jacolliot states categorically that the society of Nine did actually exist. And, to make it all the more intriguing, he refers in this connection to certain techniques, unimaginable in 1860, such as, for example, the liberation of energy, sterilization by radiation and psychological warfare.” Note that Jacolliot died more than 30 years before the novel was written, so his knowledge of the Nine would be very interesting if it was real. However, while Pauwels and Bergier claim to have found information on the Nine Unknown in Jacolliot’s work, they fail to mention the specific text in which they found this information. I have not read anything by Jacolliot, but other people have, and as far as I know, nobody has found the section alluded to by P + B. Mundy’s novel is then, as far as any sane person has been able to tell, the earliest mention of the Nine Unknown.

A big chunk of Pauwels and Bergier’s section on the Nine Unknown has to do with the Nine’s origins. Apparently they were founded by Emperor Asoka (Ashoka). You will notice however, that all respectable sources (examples 1, 2, 3) on the Emperor completely fail to mention the Nine. Is that because the Nine have suppressed this information or because it’s a load of bollocks? I’ll let you decide.

Since Pauwels and Bergier’s book came out, the Nine Unknown have become key players in the world of occultism and conspiracy theories. They pop up everywhere. Anton LaVey thanked them in the dedication that was included in the first editions of the Satanic Bible. According to Frank Lauria’s Doctor Orient Series (expect a post on same soon), the Nine are a benevolent group of mystics including the immortal Count De Saint Germain. They even appear as rockstars in the Illuminatus! Trilogy.
nine unknown illuminatus

Mundy’s text has been widely available for almost a century, and you’d think that anybody writing about the Nine Unknown would have started with reading this book. Unfortunately, judging by the articles I’ve seen online, this has not been case. If you want to read it yourself, it’s available online. However, nearly all of the copies of the text I found online were incomplete, missing several pages at the very end of the novel. Here is a link to the complete text.

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.

100,000 Years of Man’s Unknown History

charroux- unknown history.jpg
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.

The Almighty Power of the Vril-Ya!

the-coming-race-vril The Coming Race – Edward Bulwer Lytton
P.F. Collier – 1892 (Originally published 1871)
This is the third of Bulwer Lytton’s works that I’ve reviewed here, and in a way it’s the least fitting. While The Haunters and the Haunted and Zanoni both dealt explicitly with the supernatural, The Coming Race or Vril, the Power of the Coming Race, as it was later re-titled, is more of an adventure/early sci-fi novel. So why include it on this blog? Well, despite the fact that it is very clearly a novel, some people have taken it to be literally true, and this short, rather silly book is the origin of several ridiculous conspiracy theories. It played helped popularize the Hollow-Earth theory, and some folks claim that it’s responsible for starting the Second World War.

So let’s take a look at the plot. (Don’t worry; it’s quite boring and reading this won’t ruin the excitement if you do choose to read the novel.) Right at the beginning of the book, the narrator falls down a hole in a cave and ends up in a world within the Earth. Then he bumps into some ‘Vril-Ya’, a race of fascinating but intimidating humanoids, who take him to their house and teach him their language. 70% of the book is taken up with the narrator’s description of these beings’ society, folklore, and language. The Vril-Ya’s technology is powered by a strange energy called Vril that seems to emanate from the creatures themselves. It becomes evident that these creatures’ descendants ended up underground as a result of the flood of Genesis, and so are somewhat human. They are utterly repulsed by the narrator’s accounts of terrestrial humanity and warn him that some day, when the time is right, they will break through the Earth’s crust to eradicate our species. One of the Vril-Ya falls in love with the narrator but decides to take him back up to his own world to prevent the chaos that would surely ensue were they to consummate their relationship.

I actually got through quite a bit of this book with the audio version from librivox. I really enjoyed about the reader’s pronunciation. In the language of the Vril-Ya, females are collectively referred to as ‘the Gyae’, Gyae being pronounced Jie-ay. A single female is a ‘Gy’, and the person reading the audiobook pronounced this as Gee, and I mean Gee with a hard G sound like the one in ‘Goat’ or ‘Game’. This probably won’t seem funny to most people, but any book that uses the word gee to refer to any woman is bound to illicit a few chuckles in certain parts of the world. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I suggest you read the following quotes from the book to any of your Irish friends and take note of their reactions.

1. “I often think of the young gee as I sit alone at night”
2. “This young gee was a magnificent specimen of the muscular force to which the females of her country attain.”
3. ” the gee would willingly have accepted me, but her parents refused their consent.”

Gees aside, The Coming Race is a bit disappointing. It’s the first novel I’ve read since November, and it made a welcome change to the dry books on mythology I’ve otherwise been reading. I zipped through it so quickly that I didn’t realize that the plot was going nowhere until I had very nearly finished it. This book is more of a snapshot of an imaginary society than a story about members of that society.

Surely the author had a reason for writing an adventure novel that contained minimal adventure. If not meant to thrill its readers, perhaps The Coming Race was meant to educate them. What message was Lytton trying to convey with his depiction of a race of subterranean super-humans? Let’s take a moment to recapitulate what we know about the Vril-Ya.
1. They are superior, mentally and physically, to the rest of humankind; i.e., they are super-humans.
2. They will some day rise up from the underground and exterminate all lower forms of human life.
3. They are “descended from the same ancestors as the Great Aryan family”.
Could Bulwer Lytton have predicted the rise of Nazi Germany in 1871???

Well if he didn’t predict it, he very possibly influenced it. His idea of Vril, a manipulable occult energy, coincided with theosophical notions of the late 1800s, and it’s certain that some people did take his ideas more seriously then they should have. In Morning of the Magicians, Pauwels and Bergier popularized the idea that one of these theosophical groups went on to become the Thule Society, a real group of occultists that were inextricably linked with the Nazi party. Odd as this may sound at first, it’s really not that hard to accept. The Nazis were definitely influenced by strange groups of occultists, and Lytton had been incredibly successful as a writer of popular fiction, fiction that was, as I have already discussed, taken a little too seriously by the European mystics of the time.

So if this book did influence the Nazis, what kind of influence did it have? If it had any effect, I would imagine it was quite small, serving perhaps as mere affirmation of the things that these crazies already believed. But there are those who claim that Vril had a much larger effect on WWII. One story goes that there was a German secret society that used sex magic and other diabolical practices to attain the Vril force. Apparently, some of its members did actually attain this power and used it to communicate with aliens from the Aldebaran Solar System. These aliens, not knowing that the Nazis were evil, sent back instructions on how to make spaceships, and the Nazis started building and using flying-saucers to win the war. Unfortunately for them, the Aldebaran aliens found out that they were the bad guys, and they cut their communication lines. The medium that the aliens had been communicating through, one Maria Orsic, went missing soon thereafter, and there is a lot of speculation about whether she was assassinated by an angry Nazi or abducted and taken to a planet near Aldebaran.

Think about that, the Vril force went from under the Earth’s crust to out of the Earth’s solar system. The only thing that’s missing in this conspiracy is some mention of the Holy Grail. But wait, we know that Otto Rahn, the Nazi Indiana Jones, spent years searching for the Holy Grail, and didn’t he claim that the Grail was a powerful force rather than a Chalice? Is Vril power the Holy Grail? I’m going to have to look into that.

Despite The Coming Race‘s relative crumminess, I know I’ll be referencing it again soon. In the meantime, give it a read; it’s short enough that you probably won’t feel like you’ve wasted your time reading it.

Holy Blood, Holy Grail

Holy Blood, Holy Grail – Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln
Dell – 1983 (First published 1982)

I finally bit the bullet and read Holy Blood, Holy Grail. This very stupid pile of shit is perhaps best known today as the blueprint for Dan Brown’s the Da Vinci Code, but it was a best-seller on its release and has had a huge effect on the formulation and popularization of conspiracy theories ever since. I never expected it to be any good, but I thought that I should read it to familiarize myself with modern grail lore before beginning some of the more dubious texts on that subject.

The main idea here, and we’ve all heard this one before, is that Jesus had a kid. The authors claim that Jesus was actually married to Mary Magdalen and that this pair had a child. Personally, I see absolutely no reason for the historical Jesus to have remained celibate. We don’t know where he was or what he was doing during his 20s. What do most people do in their 20s? They go out and ride whatever they can get their hands on. It would have been weird if Jesus was a virgin. I don’t need the evidence in this book to convince me that he might have had kids. I would be more interested in sensible reasons to believe that he didn’t. And less than 50 pages of this 450+ page book are actually spent discussing the evidence for a horny Jesus. The other 400 pages are taken up with the authors making complete idiots out of themselves.

So one of the authors, I can’t remember which one, read a book on his holidays one year in the early 70s. This book was about Berenger Sauniere, a priest in the south of France who had suddenly became rich in the late 1800s. There were all kinds of rumours about Berenger having found treasure of some kind, and the lad reading the book thought this was pretty interesting and decided to do some research on the mystery of the priest’s wealth. He went over to France and started looking for clues. While he was over there, somebody gave him an anonymous tip-off that there was a dossier of curious documents in a library in Paris that might contain information pertaining to this mystery. Sure enough, he goes to the library and there, in this dossier, are a bunch of cool documents that keep mentioning a weird sounding secret society. Convinced that he’s onto something big, the lad makes some photocopies, goes back to England and starts mashing his pieces of the puzzle together. A few weeks later he gets another call from his anonymous informant who tells him that a few more very interesting documents seem to have shown up in the secret dossier in the library. Our boy is on the next ferry over to France, and what do ye know, when he gets to the library, the dossier is looking thicker. This happens a few times over the next few years, and by the end, his friends and he have managed to piece together the peculiar history of the Priory of Sion, a mysterious secret society that has links to the Merovingian and Carolingian Dynasties of Medieval France, the Knights of the Round Table, the Cathars, the Knights Templar, the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons.

The authors use all the evidence from the secret dossier and a generous dollop of imagination to argue that the Priory of Sion is a secret society devoted to protecting the bloodline of Jesus Christ in the hopes that they will someday be able to reinstate his descendants as the rightful rulers of civilization.

The problem here is that the Priory of Sion is completely fake. It was made up by Pierre La Plantard, a dodgy Frenchman who believed that he was the descendant of some medieval French Kings. Him and his friends had been the ones putting the documents into the secret dossier all along. The whole thing was a load of absolute bollocks. Now, Pierre’s claim was that he was of Merovingian descent, but the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail were claiming that he was the direct descendant of Jesus Christ. He got a bit embarrassed about this and renounced the book. His mates that were involved the hoax came forth and acknowledged that they made up the whole thing. (As far as I can tell, the authors’ response to this was to maintain that their claims were true and to claim that La Plantard was lying about having lied.)

Pierre La Plantard (AKA Pierre Christ)

I knew that the Priory of Sion was made up before I read this book, and that made it a fairly excruciating experience. The ‘evidence’ presented in here is taken from novels, legends, the bible and hearsay, and the authors’ reasoning is absolutely infuriating. You’ll see their approach criticized in any review of this book; it really is terrible. It made me recall that of the protagonists in Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. (And I would find it very surprising if that novel, written in 1988, was not written partly in response to this book and how it had been received.) Leigh, Lincoln and Baigent accept any tangential idea that pops into their heads as long as it can not be immediately disproved. I have adopted a similar approach below to prove that Adolf Hitler was a descendant of Count Dracula:

Transylvania was under Austrian Hapsburg Rule between 1699 and 1867. This would have meant that things and people from Transylvania would sometimes have found their way back to Austria.

Count Dracula, Transylvania’s most infamous resident, although made famous in an 1897 novel, was actually based on a real person, Vlad the Impaler. Vampyrism is probably not a supernatural condition but some kind of hereditary disease, and so Vlad’s descendants would also have been vampires if he was one, which he probably was.

Did the bloodline of Dracula find its way into Braunau am Inn, the birthplace of Hitler?

Well that would explain a lot. We know that Hitler’s mother was born of peasant stock and had a thing for older men. (Hitlers dad was 23 years her senior.) Would she have been able to resist the charms of a tall, dark stranger with a mysterious foreign accent? I think not. If Vlad, or one of his descendants, had shown up on her doorstep, she would have let them drain her right then and there. Ok, I know at this point our argument might seem a bit tenuous, but if we continue with this line of reasoning, a lot of things begin to make a lot of sense.

Ok, so Hitler’s mother was definitely drained by a vampire, thus becoming a vampire herself. She got pregnant with a vampire baby. She tried to pass it off as her employer’s, but this baby had dark hair, like his real father.

Hitler was certainly responsible for a lot of bloodshed. Think about it dummy: Vampires love blood! Was his body ever found? No; he flew off into the night!

At this stage, anyone with an ounce of sense will agree that Hitler is a vampire and probably still alive. It would be utterly ridiculous to claim otherwise.

I did that in about 10 minutes, and I reckon it’s probably more entertaining and no less sensible than the work of Leigh, Baigent and Lincoln.

Holy Blood, Holy Grail is a pile of shit, freshly emitted from a large hairy anus. At least the Da Vinci Code was superficially entertaining. This is just embarrassing. I wouldn’t recommend it.

This post marks two years of this blog. I’m going to become a dad at some stage in the next month, so things on here might be a bit slow for a while. Make sure you like the facebook page for future updates. Thanks for all the interest.

Illuminati Confirmed! – New World Order (The Ancient Plan of Secret Societies) – William T. Still

New World Order (The Ancient Plan of Secret Societies) – William T. Still
1990 – Huntington House Publishers

After a very boring introductory chapter, this book contains about 70 pages of tolerably silly conspiracies, but then it gets very, very boring. Just from the cover, I expected something similar to Ed Decker’s Dark Side of Freemasonry, and I wasn’t far off. This is a book of conspiracies from the point of view of a conservative Christian author.

As far as these things go, it was fairly well researched. William T. Still is clearly a nutjob, but he’s competent enough to provide his references. The book contains nothing I haven’t come across before, but it was novel to see how the author managed to link the Atlantean origins of secret societies, William Shakespeare’s true identity, and the Freemason’s involvement with the Jack the Ripper murders. Still is the kind of wacko that Umberto Eco was making fun of in Foucault’s Pendulum.

truman
The central idea behind the book is that the Illuminati is a Luciferian/Satanic cult dedicated to exterminating religion, taking over the world, and bringing about the reign of the Antichrist. If America doesn’t adopt conservative politics and good old-fashioned family values, the country is going to allow itself to be taken control of by a small group of the super-wealthy who don’t care about anyone but themselves. The scary thing about this book is that you know that the people who read it and have taken it seriously are the exact same people who are going to vote for Donald Trump.

The Illuminati has recently reentered the public consciousness. Nearly every teenager in North America has seen the ‘Illuminati Confirmed’ memes. Why now? Maybe it’s because the idea of a small, faceless group of the super wealthy being in charge of America is actually less frightening than the faces of the small group of the super wealthy that clearly are running the country.

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!”

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

New World Order (The Ancient Plan of Secret Societies) – William T. Still 1990 – Huntington House Publishers

New World Order (The Ancient Plan of Secret Societies) – William T. Still
1990 – Huntington House Publishers