I’ve read 2 Nick Redfern books in the last year. The first was about evil aliens and the end of the world, and the second was about progeria patients flying UFOs. Nothing I have read by this man has made me think he is a trustworthy source. Nevertheless, I recently read another of his books, Bloodline of the Gods. I can safely say that this one was much, much sillier than the other two. This is presented as non-fiction, but its connection with reality is so tenuous that it is impossible to take seriously. I read plenty of wacky books, but this one doesn’t even try to be convincing. It’s just a series of ifs.
Bloodline of the Gods: Unravel the Mystery of the Human Blood Type to Reveal the Aliens Among Us
Weiser – 2015
A long time ago, the Annunaki aliens came down to Earth to harvest our gold so that they could take it back to their planet to pump it into their atmosphere to prevent the greenhouse effect from destroying their planet. When they got here, they realised that it was going to take a long time to export all of our gold, so they spliced their DNA with that of the neanderthals to create a hybrid race that would continue harvesting Earth’s gold. These hybrids were slightly unruly, and so some of the Annunaki stayed behind to make sure they were behaving themselves. These are the reptilians. The proof of this story is the fact that many alien abductees have RH negative blood.
Redfern gets into more detail, but the whole thing is so ridiculous that I’m not going to bother getting into particulars. This is clearly a steaming pile of horseshit that the author himself doesn’t believe.
Unlike other authors who write multiple books about aliens, Redfern doesn’t build on what he was already written. All three of the books I have read by him present different, incompatible accounts of what’s going on with UFO sightings and alien abductions. Aliens may well be evil demons, disabled Japanese people or shapelifting lizards, but surely they can’t be all of those things at once.
Honestly, this book was so stupid that I considered giving up after a few chapters. Part of what convinced me to plow through and finish this was the fact that I had an audiobook version that I could listen to while cleaning the dishes. There’s a part in the book where Redfern uses the word “ass”, but the audiobook narrator is British and pronounces it as “arse”. This one quote made the entire experience worthwhile.
It was one thing to get nabbed by aliens, taken on-board their craft, and hosed down like a muddy, old car. It was quite another to get rewarded after that traumatic experience with a fine and tasty piece of extraterrestrial arse.
Bloodline of the Gods is Teletubbies, use your imagination crap. You’d have to be a ham sandwich to take this stuff seriously. I don’t think I’ll bother with any more Redfern for a while.
I first came across the name Jim Brandon when i was researching James Shelby Downard last year. Brandon was the guy who was interviewing Downard on the Sirius Rising recording that resulted in Robert Anton Wilson describing Downard’s ideas as the “the most absurd, the most incredible, the most ridiculous Illuminati theory of them all”. A little research on Brandon told me that wrote two books on Fortean phenomena, Weird America and The Rebirth of Pan but that most of his literary output was neo Nazi material that came out under the name William Grimstad.
Now I don’t have any interest in promoting the beliefs of neo-Nazis, but I do like reading weird stuff, and what I had read about Brandon sounded truly bizarre. After glancing through Weird America, I decided to skip it. It’s basically a list of places in America where Fortean phenomena have been witnessed. It might be useful as a reference book, but the thought of reading it cover to cover seemed pretty boring. I decided to focus instead on his The Rebirth of Pan. A book that claims that the great God Pan, a great and powerful Earth spirit is alive and dedicated to causing mischief in North America.
The Rebirth of Pan: Hidden Faces of the American Earth Spirt
Firebird Press – 1983
This is definitely among the weirdest books I have read. Its central claim, that science has become too rigid to meaningfully account for every known phenomena, is one I have encountered many times before, but the reasons given here to believe this claim are definitely more far-fetched than the usual stuff. I’ll give a brief summary of each chapter, or at least what I got out of each chapter.
Chapter 1 Bigfeet appear near horny people and menstruating. Aleister Crowley and Kenneth Grant point out that sex can be used to bring about bizarre magical entities. This would explain why we can’t catch bigfeet the way we catch other wild animals. Instead of luring our traps with meat, we should use a shagging couple.
Chapter 2 North America is covered in mounds. We don’t know who made these or how. Traditional archaeologists have suggested it was prehistoric Native Americans, but the author seems to believe that it was more likely a race of giants and a race of cannibal pygmies who were responsible.
Chapter 3 This chapter is a discussion of a bunch of artifacts that have shown up in America with text on them. Many claim these were from Native Americans, but others point out the similarities between this writing and Hebrew, Norse and Chinese. Most of these artifacts were dismissed as hoaxes, but author dismisses this notion because one hoax is unlikely but more than one is even more unlikely. This chapter is a bit confusing because Brandon includes both sides of the discussion, and it’s not until the end that he tells you what he actually thinks. He doesn’t think these artifacts come from native Americans or pre-Columbian visitors to North America. He thinks they’re from bigfoot. Now bigfoot here is a transdimensional entity, the kind encountered in The Psychic Sasquatch and some other book I’ve read recently that I can’t quite remember. (Maybe John Keel?) The writing on these artifacts is Norse, Chinese, and Latin, or some combination thereof. Whatever entity left these artifacts came from another time or dimension and they didn’t know which language the locals used, so they wrote in the one they were most familiar with. This is definitely the least unlikely possibility.
Chapter 4 Fossils that feature well preserved lifeforms may not be what scientists say they are. How do we know that these aren’t just rocks that are actually giving birth to these creatures? The author claims that idea that life comes from rocks is much better than the theory of evolution. Proof of this idea is found in the fact that bigfoot often makes piles of rocks and throws rocks at people to attack them. Weird stuff often happens near water, but more interestingly, weird stuff (tornadoes, bigfoot sightings, random explosions) frequently happen to trailer parks. The author suggests that this is probably because as metal containers, trailers are more likely to trap mysterious orgone energy, but it seems more likely to me that they’re more susceptible to tornado damage because they’re not anchored to the ground and more susceptible to bigfoot attacks because the people living in them are poor and probably uneducated (and hence more delicious to predators). It turns out that many of the strange structures and rocks dotted across America were made by Pan, the Earth spirit.
Chapter 5 More of the same, but this time he looks at how the measurements of some of these structures can be manipulated so that they relate to the measurements of the pyramids at Giza. Some of the structures he discusses here are from a book called Traditions of De Coo Dah by William Pidgeon, a book that has been accepted as a hoax for over a century. Brandon claims that the reason nobody has ever seen the monuments described by Pidgeon is that Pan caused the Earth to swallow them up in a reversal of the way he created many of the mysterious mounds previously discussed.
Chapter 6 Some numbers 23 and 33 are linked with countless weird events. Some names are too. Author lists off bad things that have happened in places called Lafayette or Fayette. These include cryptid sightings, the murders of presidents and prophets and more. He also points out that the Amityville murderer‘s name was Defeo (de-fay-oh), and Aleister Crowley’s mantra of, “do what thou wilt” translated into latin is, “fay que ce voudras”.
Chapter 7 The last chapter is basically a long conclusion that adds little to the author’s claims. It talks about symbolism and alchemy and Sirius. The nost intersting claim here is that some aliens, probably those from Orion, hate dogs because of the link between dogs and Sirius. The aliens from Sirius and Orion supposedly hate eachother according to some alien contactees. Bigfeet also hate dogs, so maybe they are aliens?
Appendices Only point of interest here is the suggestion that cattle mutialtions are done by bigfoot.
Overall, this book was a boring slog. It had some truly ridiculous ideas, but the reasoning is just too weak for it to be taken seriously at all. I love the idea of reading a book that references the works of Aleister Crowley, H.P. Lovecraft, Kenneth Grant, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Montague Summers, and Robert Anton Wilson, but there was no real cohesion to this jumbling mess. It’s not surprising that the author is a dumb piece of trash.
I would imagine that I have read more books on aliens than most sensible people, but in truth, I have only scratched the surface of UFO literature. Within ufology, there are texts that get mentioned again and again, and there are certain cases that many UFO writers expect their readers to be familiar with. One of the foundational texts of the field (maybe because of its role in John Keel’s Mothman Prophecies, another classic) is Woodrow Derenberger’s Visitors from Lanulos.
Originally published 1971
In truth, it has been many a twelvemonth since I read Keel’s Mothman book, but one of the things I do remember from it was the name Indrid Cold. Indrid Cold was a spaceman from a planet called Lanulos. He appeared and spoke telepathically to a salesman named Woodrow Derenberger when Woody was driving one night. After this Woody’s life changed forever. This book tells Woody’s story.
The first half of the book describes Woody’s encounters with Indrid Cold and his alien buddies and their trips around the universe in the spacemen’s spaceship. The latter half is mostly rants about how the government can’t be trusted because they are covering up the existence of our benevolent space brothers. Here’s my summary:
Ch.1 Woody meets an alien on the road and has a telepathic chat. The alien is nice. Woody tells his mates and becomes famous. Ch. 2 NASA won’t disclose their alien info to public in case it causes a wave of suicide and women throwing their babies in front of trains. Ch. 3 Indrid Cold and his buddy show up on the author’s doorstep and tell him about their world’s religion. They have no wars because they communicate telepathically and everyone loves everyone. Humans can learn telepathy too. The author can talk telepathically with 2 of his mates. Ch. 4 Woody goes for a ride on a spaceship. They go to the Amazon, then Saturn and then Indrid’s mother ship. Woody meets lots of nice people there and eats alien potatoes. They take him to their planet but don’t let him get off because he’s not immunized. They tell him that they can let him live on Mars or Venus if he wants. It’s strange to me that these aliens are just men. Ch. 5-7 Woody goes back to Lanulos and goes to Indrid’s home and meets his kids. Indrid has a daughter who was born shortly after Christmas. How that makes any sense to an alien is confusing. Woody goes out for a walk. The streets have built in escalators like at the airport. All the aliens are nude, and when Woody takes his clothes off to fit in, they stare at him because they have never seen a fat person before. Their existence is paradise. These aliens from a different planet eat beef and drink coffee. They don’t have sex outside of marriage. They are Christians and believe they will be with jesus when they die. A bit odd… Ch. 8 Woody tells of the humanoids, a different race of aliens who like to steal things from people. Indrid Cold and his buddies chase these pesky (although not malicious) aliens out of the universe for annoying woody. Ch. 9 Another alien takes Woody for a spaceship ride around the world. Their first stop is Iraq. Ch. 10 Woody recounts some amusing events including the time that John Keel fell into a cowpat in his garden and having to deal with a rumour that the aliens had impregnated him. Ch. 11 Woody describes the alien’s relationship with his family. His wife and kids were initially terrified, but once Indrid and his buddy dressed up as salesmen and tricked his wife into letting them into her home, she came to trust them… Woody boasts how he would get the space people to track his wife when she left the house alone. Quite a creepy thing to think about. Was he just following her himself and gaslighting her for fun? Ch. 12 Woody goes to Venus. It is covered in vegetation and rivers and lakes. It’s always 100 degrees there. (It’s actually usually over 800 degrees and has no water.) Ch. 13 Woody and his wife go to a party with a bunch of other freaks who constantly see spaceships. Unsurprisingly some aliens come to spy on them but run away when the partygoers start making spaceship noises. Ch. 14 A few stories from other contactees including a mentally ill housewife who was cured of her neuroses on a trip to Lanulos and a doctor who gets telepathic advise from a Martian doctor on how to treat his patients. At one point aliens broke into this doctors house and scared his children when he wasn’t home. Ch. 15 A race of dwarfs from the planet Jammu come to Earth and take blood samples from people under the orders of a dwarf named “Marma”. Men in Black are members of government agencies who want to maintain the status quo. Ch. 16 The Government knows all about the aliens, but they keep it secret for control. They are liars. At this point the book is taking a very conspiratorial turn. Ch. 17 Details a bunch of UFO sightings Ch. 18 Men in Black call Woody and his family. There are no bad aliens visiting Earth because bad aliens wouldn’t be able to get a flight license from the Intergalactic Federation. Ch. 19 Some more UFO reports Ch. 20 The government know everything and are keeping it all a secret. Ch. 21 Government scientists can’t be trusted. The military have alien crafts, but these weren’t from crashes or shot down. The aliens gave them to the military.
Obviously, the whole book is a bunch of nonsense. The visits to Lanulos were only marginally less ridiclous than Cecil Michael’s Round Trip to Hell in a Flying Saucer. I know that John Keel had a reputation for being willing to twist facts to suit his narrative, but it’s hard to believe that any sensible person would give any credence to Derenberger’s insane ramblings. This is cuckoo- crazy rubbish. Much of the attention paid to this book nowadays comes from Derenberger’s description of Indrid Cold’s creepy smile, but I don’t recall that being mentioned in the book, and if it is, it must have been a brief mention. The only part about Indrid’s face that I can find is where in the first chapter it says his expression changed sometimes. Maybe Derenberger did mention it, but it seems that the internet has really blown that tiny detail out of proportion. According to Woody, ol’ Indrid was a super-genuine, nice fellow.
I’ve been having a busy time juggling work, family and studying recently, and I’m struggling to find time to read for entertainment. Audiobooks are ideal for my current situation, but I find it difficult to find free non-fiction audiobooks that are even slightly relevant to my interests. When I found an audiobook copy of Keel’s 1971 book Our Haunted Planet, I thought I’d give it a go.
Futura – 1975 (Originally published 1971)
The only other book I’ve read by Keel was The Mothman Prophecies, and this is a far less focused book than that one. There’s a lot of stuff about UFOs, ancient archaeology, and most other Fortean phenomenon in here. The main idea is that there were civilisations on Earth before humans evolved. This was entertaining enough to listen to while I washed the dishes, but the stuff in here that I’ve encountered before is so ludicrous that it was hard to take any of the other information seriously. This is very much in the same vein as Pauwels and Bergier’s Morning of the Magicians and that kind of crap.
Very few of the ideas in this book have any basis in reality. Our Haunted Planet is more than 50 years old at this point, and the immediate availability of more accurate information on the internet renders it obsolete. I can only recommend reading this if you want to understand what people on the fringes of thought were into half a century ago. I do quite enjoy thinking about that, and I will probably read more Keel in the future.
Normally I only post on Sundays, but I have a seasonal post lined up for Thursday. Check back then if you’re interested!
Final Events and the Secret Government Group on UFOs and the Afterlife – Nick Redfern
Anomalist Books – 2013
Aliens are not extraterrestrials, they are demons that were set loose by Jack Parsons, and they are trying to bring about the end of the world. (They may also be harvesting human souls.) The Collins Elite, a top secret group within the United States government know about this, and they have been working for decades to make sure this doesn’t happen. (Then again, it is possible that all of the information they have been given/putting out has been disinformation. They may unwittingly aid Satan in bringing about the apocalypse.)
There’s some novel details in here, but the basic premise behind this book (that aliens are demons) is one I have encountered a few times before. The most surprising element of Final Events is that its intended audience seems to be conspiracy nuts and fans of Forteana rather than just evangelical Christians (unlike Bob Larson’s UFO book and Basil Tyson’s UFOs Satanic Terror. The problem is that if you don’t believe in Jesus-hating demons, none of this seems remotely convincing. If you’re not a Christian, there’s no real threat being presented, and all of the people claiming that Aliens are Satan’s henchmen just seem like idiots. Redfern doesn’t come across as preachy, but it does feel like he is trying to frighten his Christian readers. I suppose that is a noble thing to do.
I know that the US government has put money into researching bizarre ideas, and I’m sure there’s some military guys who do think that aliens are evil, but this is clearly a book of bullshit. It’s not even a case of misinterpretations either. Most of this was obviously just made up. I’m not saying that Redfern made it up himself, but if he didn’t, his sources definitely did. The guy who put him onto this story was a priest who had been approached by members of the ultra-secretive Collins Elite. I liked the first few chapters, but after a while it got a little boring. Many of the sources it references are absolute tripe too. It discusses both the work of Kurt Koch and Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain. It also mentions last week’s book, the bizarre Round Trip to Hell in a Flying Saucer. Seeing all these titles mentioned alongside the work of my old friends, Whitley Strieber and Aleister Crowley, was fun. It’s nice to know that there are other people out there who spend their time reading this stuff.
Final Events didn’t exactly blow me away, but I enjoyed reading it. I am quite sure that I’ll be reading more books by Nick Redfern in the future. Apparently he has one in which he claims that the alien bodies found at Roswell were actually those of progeria patients. LOL. Definitely checking that one out soon.
A couple of years ago, after I posted about UFOs Satanic Terror, my pal put me on the trail of another book on the same topic called Round Trip to Hell in a Flying Saucer. With a title like that, who could resist? I finally got my hands on a copy yesterday.
Vantage – 1955
Cecil Michael, a mechanic, goes out for a walk and he sees a UFO. A few days later, 2 weird men come into his shop and stand there looking at him. They’re tall, strong, handsome looking men, but they’re weirdly silent and they scare Cecil. He gets really freaked out once they start turning transparent in front of him. They stay in his shop all day, disappearing whenever a customer comes in, and then leave at 4.30. Cecil knows almost immediately that they’re from space. The same thing happens the next day, and the day after that.
These lads are really annoying, and Cecil frequently wants to punch them in their fool faces, but he’s too afraid/in awe of them. Despite that fact that they are capable of speaking telepathically, they say almost nothing to Cecil. At one point they show him their insides. They are made of tubes and electronic parts. They’re a real pair of jackasses.
The spacemen do the same thing every day for a couple of months and then take Cecil for a ride in their spaceship. To do so without inconveniencing Cecil, they create a robot clone of him that stays working in his shop while he’s away. Cecil’s brother ties him to the inside of the spacemen’s flying saucer, and they fly away from Earth and land on a red planet that’s mostly on fire.
When they land, the 2 spacemen stay in the UFO, but Cecil gets off and meets a scruffy bum who tells Cecil that he has a job for him. Cecil doesn’t want the job, so the bum gives him some horrible food and introduces him to his other workers. They are small pygmy men. Their job is to throw corpses into a lake that carries the corpses into a fire. Cecil tells the bum again that he doesn’t want the job, and the bum gets angry with him. Then Jesus appears in the sky. Cecil tells the bum that Jesus will make sure that he doesn’t have to work for him.
The aliens take Cecil back to Earth. After a few more days, they stop showing up in Cecil’s shop because he has been smoking too many cigarettes.
That’s what happens in this book. It’s such a ridiculous story that I find it hard to imagine the author thinking that anyone would believe it. Some of the details are so arbitrary that it reads more like a description of a nightmare than a cohesive narrative. The part where his brother helps him into the spaceship makes no sense. Also, it’s very unclear as to whom the spacemen are working for. Cecil is full of praise for them, but it does seem that they are under the employ of scruffy old Satan. If I was going to make up a story about being kidnapped by spacemen and taken to Hell, I would make the story more cohesive. Maybe this account was just a dream and Cecil Michael thought it was real.
This isn’t like the other Satanic alien books that I’ve read in that it’s not preachy. While Jesus acts as a saviour here, it seems like it’s more a hologram of Jesus than the real guy. This book doesn’t come close to Larson or Tyson’s attempts to use aliens to scare people into Christianity. Round Trip to Hell in a Flying Saucer is a unique and truly bizarre book.
Round Trip To Hell in a Flying Saucer came out first in 1955, but it was republished in 1971 in New Zealand. Copies of these editions are very hard to find, but the complete text was republished in Round Trip To Hell in a Flying Saucer: UFO Parasites – Alien Soul Suckers – Invaders From Demonic Realms Paperback, a 2011 anthology on Satanic aliens compiled by Timothy Green Beckley and Sean Casteel. I may well turn to that book in the future.
Nocturnal Revelries 