"A brief cold account of a difficult life"

Ann Andrews and Jean Ritchie. Abducted - The True Story of Alien Abduction in Rural England. Headline, 1998. -- Reviewed by Kevin McClure. Published in Magonia 64, August 1998

Of all the sad pantheon of books about allegedly abducted individuals, this probably demonstrates the persuasiveness of the abduction mythos most clearly. A bleak, cold account of the difficult life of a child who was still only fourteen when the book was published, and his mother - co-author of the book - offered him up for media publicity, it was widely reported on, and was uncritically serialized over four days in the Sun. I understand that the mother wouldn't speak to any known sceptic in the course of the publicity. The Mail on Sunday suggested that the family might have received £60,000 for the book and serialization.

You'll expect me to summarize the story of this child and his experiences, and I can to the extent that it includes the typical elements of the abduction mythos. Mysterious disappearances, journeys through locked doors, strange powers, knowledge, and communications. Unexplainable, if shortlived, injuries to the child, and disease, mutilation, death, and unexplained disappearance for animals on the family smallholding. All that you could believe or disbelieve, depending on your attitude.

But it isn't as simple as that. There are two distinctly different, contradictory versions of this story, one published here, in 1998, the other written by Tony Dodd for the March/April 1996 issue of UFO Magazine. They differ in several vital respects, most importantly that in the earlier account the child had no strange experiences till he was eight, in the later they started - in a big way - when he was just four.

Its impossible for both versions to be true. I've written to Tony Dodd - who is much praised in the book as its primary investigator - and to the publishers, asking for answers to a set of very specific questions, but both have avoided any endeavour to resolve these contradictions. Consequently, although the accounts allegedly deal with the same events, and derive from the work of the same investigator, both are rendered useless for any serious reader. We cannot tell which, if either, is in any way true. And I wonder if the publishers actually know any more in that respect than me.

Both versions describe a child who had/has serious behavioural problems at home and school, problems which warranted psychological and psychiatric intervention. We are told little of any diagnosis that was made, but the professional view is generally dismissed: the story is that, three years or so ago, this child saw a TV programme featuring a man who had produced, under hypnosis, 'memories' of being abducted by aliens. The family decided that their child, too, was an abductee, read UFO books and magazines, and found a UFO investigator to assist them. While the family's active search for publicity and its material advantages may undermine any serious analysis of the development of this case, it seems that they were happy to find what appeared to be a plausible explanation - excuse, even - for the child's problems. Indeed, despite a strangely uninvolved account of the child's decision to end his own life at one stage, the family seem to have taken to their status.

Tony Dodd, himself both an abductee and old-style contactee, said of the child that "Having been selected for multiple abductions, I feel the aliens will follow him for many years to come, probably all his life. But he will come to terms with it He'll find a way of coping. I think he may, eventually, prove to be a very important abductee. Some of the experiences he has had make me think he is being groomed as a 'teacher', a human who is entrusted by the aliens with messages for the whole of mankind."

Since Dodd's involvement, the child's experiences have continued, and his elder brother has recalled a range of anomalous experiences. The mother has found that she has been an abductee since childhood, and believes she may have found a reason for a lost pregnancy. One of the book's strong, but undiscussed, assertions is that "...she began to look again at the circumstances of her father's life, and to see a pattern there which suggests he, too, was an abductee. It is not a case of lightning striking three times in the same place... abductees pass on a devastating legacy to the next generation. Abduction runs in families."

If a professional, objective investigation of this case were possible, it could become the most important study of the development of an ET-based belief since When Prophecy Fails. There, it was a group of believers who chose each other in the context of the contactee movement of the Fifties, with strong overtones of Theosophy. Here, we have a case in the context of the X-Files mythos of the Nineties, actually involving just one family. Although the close involvement of other believers is certainly important, these are not just people brought together by their beliefs: instead, the family members have gradually emerged as experiencers, convinced, presumably, by the interpretations placed on their life experiences by outsiders.

Hypnosis has not been necessary: the cultural and social context of this family's search for a solution to various of its problems, some perhaps more material than others, has been quite enough to produce this unsatisfactory account of unlikely events. Events which seem destined to remain hidden behind the kind of shroud of secrecy that abduction investigators - Tony Dodd included - generally purport to deplore.

The Welsh Wonder

Sian Busby. A Wonderful Little Girl: the True Story of Sarah Jacob the Welsh Fasting Girl. Short Books, 2003. -- Reviewed by Peter Rogerson. First published on-line September 2003

In 1869, a year on the cusp of the modern age, a 12 year old girl in a remote part of Camarthenshire which was itself being initiated into modernity by the railway, lies in her bed apparently taking no food. After a episode of what might have been viral encephalitis, Sarah Jacob, a physically and intellectually precocious girl takes to her bed, and has fits every time some one tries to feed her. Under medical advise her family stop feeding her. They make a solemn vow not to feed her unless she asks for it. The family, the local doctor and the minister seem unsuspicious of the facts that she doesn't get emaciated, still passes faeces and urine, and doesn't develop bed sores. For them she is a sign of the transcending of the gross physicality of the human condition, she really is a girl "who lives on the air and wants no milk nor honey". Because this is taking place in the dawn of the modern age, there is pressure to put the miracle to scientific test, and a scientific watch is put on the girl. Of course once she really is deprived of food she wastes away and dies, steadfastly refusing to ask for food, and no-one will push her to take it.

The mystery here is the one we continually encounter, that of the human motivation. Though some sceptics thought there were financially motives for fraud (Sarah became a lucrative tourist attraction), this really does not seem to be anything like the whole case. How could the local doctor and minister have been so drawn in? Their answer is one we hear over and over again: "These people are totally honest, they have no motivation for lying", and the unspoken one: "No mere peasant girl could get one over one me". And also as Busby makes clear, because this is the very dawn of the modern scientific world, what is obviously impossible to us was by no means as clear cut to them. After all this was the sort of locality in which all manner of signs of wonders would manifest themselves during the Great Revival nearly 40 years later.

In the annals of science Sarah has gone down as a pioneer anorexic, but Busby argues that descriptions of her do not paint a picture of emaciated anorexia. Though Busby does not go down this route, I'd be tempted to look in the direction of Munchhausen's Syndrome. The fits and fasts were the means by which Sarah could prolong the solicitous attention she had received during her real illness. It was also an escape from the future of back-breaking labour and baby-breeding which was the lot of women in her situation. In the end Sarah allows herself to starve to death rather than break the game and force her parents to admit to themselves that she had deceived them.

'Abduction' by one who's been there

Jenny Randles. Abduction. Robert Hale, 1988. -- Reviewed by 'Daryl Collins'

This book is a very important compilation of cases and facts which any successful theory of abductions will somehow have to explain. It deserves to be much more widely read and studied than is likely to happen. To the general reader, perhaps the most important message is that one can be abducted anywhere, just as easily in Britain as in Upstate New York. To the specialist it provides a display of some of the complex patterns hidden within the abduction phenomenon.

It is not clear that these patterns are quite consistent with the easy answers sometimes put forward by some of the contributors to Magonia. Of course, some of this confusing complexity may be an illusory by-product of the inclusion in one category of phenomena that don't really belong together - missing time cases, entity cases, contacts, various types of abductions. Yet the pattern of resemblances among these would still remain to be explained.

I will proceed by giving a quick summary of some of the main points of the book, adding comments from my own perspective as I go along. It opens with some old cases - from as far back as 1803 and 1912 - with modern features, alongside some modern cases with old or even mythological features. There follows some remarks on the SF connection pointed out by Méheust, with the interesting suggestion that films, novels and music may constitute some kind of 'back-door contacts'. To these I could add that the classical strange doors can also be found in SF stories from the 1920s and 1930s by such authors as Robert E Howard and Clark Ashton Smith of Weird Tales, and the story on which the film The Day the Earth Stood Still was based. Yet, many of these were little read, and contained many features that don't appear in abductions. Not mentioned are other films that from my own perspective are even more relevant, such as The Never Ending Story, and The Land of Faraway.

The core of the book is the display of cases and common features in chapters 5, 6, and 7. Chapter 5 is devoted to 29 British cases. Notable features include the prevalence of visions of coming disasters, which appears several times in the book. There is the strange drink often given to abductees, which I remember from my own experience. And the bizarre Appleton case includes a sample of alleged alien skin that resembled the skin of an animal, a detail unpleasantly reminiscent of some of the sensational rumours currently circulating among US ufologists. And note the case on page 60, where a car was found in a muddy field but left no tracks.

A word should be addressed to the question on page 158 as to why there seem to be few abduction reports amongst non-Caucasians. There is a good chance that this is primarily a selection effect due to cultural biases. For example, several of Budd Hopkins's cases have involved Blacks, but they are not publicly known. Probably many Blacks perceive UFOs as an area pre-empted by Whites, and fear that their input may not be welcome. Unfortunately, this may not be totally unjustified; some white news editors, police officers, etc, may take reports from black witnesses less seriously.

On page 172 there is a case involving a device placed to the forehead of an abductee. I found this particularly striking, as I remember it from one of my own experiences, back in 1948. It seems to be rare in UFO literature, though interestingly it appears in one of Whitley Strieber's novels, The Night Church.

Of much current interest is the discussion on pages 175-6 and 180-3 of the way the phenomenon seems to try to present itself as involving two alien races. While the true significance of this feature is not at all clear, speculation about conflicts between the 'Nordics' and the 'Greys' are raging in many circles of US ufology. Usually the 'Grays' are seen as hostile, or at least as amoral predators. But as Hopkins has pointed out, the supposed enemies are often described as seeming to work together. Clearly, one should avoid jumping to conclusions in the face of a phenomenon as confusing as this one.

In Chapter 8 Randles briefly summarises the results of Eddie Bullard's massive two volume study, probably the most important work done on the phenomenon to date. Any adequate theory must account for the patterns he has found, such as the coherence in the order of the component events of the abduction, and 'doorway amnesia'. The latter feature is very nicely illustrated by the very important 1980 US abduction of 'Megan Elliott', which I helped to investigate, and which is not in Randles's book. Megan recalled most of her experience consciously, except for a few moments around the entry into the object, and a longer time around the departure from it. These had to be recovered under hypnosis, which otherwise did little more than confirm her conscious recollections. just why these particular components should be singled out for amnesia is not at all clear.

Hypnosis is a dirty word in some circles, but as Randles points out, something like 20% to 30% of all cases involve no hypnosis. Yet there is little if any systematic differences between them and those recalled mostly or entirely under hypnosis. "It is simply not tenable to claim the hypnotic state as a cause for the abduction experience", she concludes (p.190).

In fact one could go much further in this direction. It is often charged that abductees are merely responding to leading questions from the hypnotist. Quite the contrary; in many cases the subject stubbornly resists following the lead of the therapist, even under considerable pressure. This is particularly prominent, for example, in the second phase of the Andreasson case, and I remember it very vividly in my own. I have seen a paper, recently drawn up by a practising psychiatrist, which cites this feature and others, including the occurrence of post-traumatic stress disorder which is only known to follow externally-induced trauma. It would be easy to interpret these points as evidence for the objective reality of abductions.

Similarly, in her final chapter, Randles cites the study carried out by Hopkins and Clamar in which psychologist Elizabeth Slater concluded that "there is no apparent psychological explanation" (p.208). An interesting experiment carried out by Randles herself is reported on pp. 204-5, and leads to similar conclusions.

In default of a psychological explanation. it is perhaps too easy to fall back on the ETH, mainly because, as Randles remarks, "this is the guise in which the abductors appear" (p.213). Not all Americans who lean towards the ETH are hypnotised by loyalty to Keyhoe. Indeed, for myself, the theory is tempting exactly because the beings told me they were from outer space!

During a long experience in 1946 I was taken into a sort of auditorium, where scenes were shown on a wall of what the beings claimed to be their own world - a devastated planet, where the cities were burnt cut wrecks and rivers of lava flowed everywhere.

No explanation was offered for all this destruction. "We have had to go out into space to search for places were there was the kind of life that could help us," came the lecture, telepathically. "Earth was one of the places we found", (Implication: there were others.) Much of this went over my head, since, at the age of five, I knew nothing of stars and planets.

Immediately I became obsessed with space and science in an attempt to make sense of what I had been shown and told. (Perhaps this awakening to science was akin to the artistic awakenings pointed out by Randles - a different kind of experience from many others with horrific consequences.) I was also left with a lifelong obsession with UFOs, trying to make sense of my experience. I have read all I can in search of answers.

Did I find my answers in this book? Randles tries hard. At the end of the book, after a brief look at the enigmatic links to OOBEs and NDEs, she proposes a 'best guess' which looks as if it might have been inspired by Chocky. Unfortunately, this theory presupposes that abductees will be returned to their starting places - contrary to the cases on pages 60 and 137 of this very book, not to mention the Megan Elliott case, and others amongst Hopkins cases and elsewhere.

So I still, don't know what abductions are. I only know that, though they may feel strange compared to everyday experience, they do not thereby feel any less real.

'Daryl Collins' is the pseudonym of an American correspondent who has undergone an abduction experience in childhood. He does not, at this stage, wish his name to be published. His identity is known to Magonia editors.

Flawed Investigation

Harley Rutledge. Project Identification: the First Scientific Field Study of the UFO Phenomena. Prentice Hall, 1981.

As this book has been widely praised in the UFO literature on both sides of the Atlantic (though a note of strong dissent came from Allan Hendry and Jerome Clark), and its sub-title promised much, I read it to see if it offered challenging new evidence.

I was disappointed, for it rapidly becomes clear that the seven year in-depth scientific field study actually consisted of a series of skywatches held informally from 6th April 1973 and formally from 21st May 1973, and on weekends and holidays until April 1974. As far as we can tell the presonnel for this study were Rutledge, members of the S.E. Missouri Astronomy Club, and some university students. One must be vague about this, as no complete list is supplied. Compared with the average skywatch held by the better organised UFO societies like BUFORA or MUFON, the Rutledge enterprise appears veryamateurish and shambolic.

What would your average run of the mill UFO group think of a skywatch organiser, who in his own words "hardly knew one contellation from another" [p.119], does not appear to have read any of the useful manuals on skywatching and celestial observation. When this ufological naivety is coupled with a strong 'will to believe' - on 11th May 1973 Rutledge saw nine unusual LITS from an aircraft and reports "a great wave of excitement overwhelmed me, UFOs really exist. And I was an eyewitness: [p.43] - the image of an objective scientific enquiry looks pretty thin. Indeed, even before the 11th May incident, in fact on the first informal skywatch, he saw 5 'UFOs', at least some of which a sceptical astronomy professor accompanying him ascribed to car headlights.

Given this background, it is less surprising than it might be thought that Rutledge sees more 'UFOs' in these skywatches than most ufologists see in a lifetime; or that most of these turn out to be ambiguous LITS which are regarded as anomalous for reasons such as: "a lighting configuration like that would be against FAA rules", "it couldn't be a helicopter because it made no noise", "it couldn't be a satellite because it suddenly blinked out". Nor is one then surprised that Rutledge makes calculations that 'demonstrate' that a UFO was a half-mile long without wondering if he had made an error, or by his careless and unjustified use of terms such as 'craft'.

Rutledge claims that the lights react to his presence and even read his thoughts, the examples given are non too impressive, and the sceptic may find the best explanation in terms of shifts of attention on the part of the observer. Hendry noted several cases where IFOs were alleged to have responded to actions and thoughts of the percipient. The pseudo-stars which hide among constellations and run away when you look at them are an old feature of Warminster days which feature in this book. Few ufologists took them seriously then, and there seems no reason to do so now. Aircraft lights, astronomical objects obscured by cloud, and the possibility of tiredness induced hallucinations seem as reasonable explanation now as then.

Ufologists have generally abandoned skywatches, recognising that they provide optimum conditions for fatigue and eyestrain, expectation, anxiety and 'atmosphere' for misidentification. When a high degree of ufological naivety and a pronounced 'will to believe' are added, the results inspire little confidence.

As I read through the book I felt a growing credibility gap, and the greatest enigma is why sensible and competent people, who could do a damn sight better themselves, have praised this upmarket Warminster Mystery to high heaven. Maybe they are awestruck by the authors PhD, and have not stopped to consider that a degree gained by studying 'photelectric emission from strontium oxide is not much qualification for observing celestial phenomena on rainy hilltops. Would a book like this, written by Bert Figgis of the Ballspond Road UFO Club have achieved any notice outside the 'how not to do it' sections of investiagtors manuals?

The book is illustrated with photographs of streaks of light in the sky, which prove nothing. The same can be said of the whole book. -- Peter Rogerson

Marina in Wonderland

Marina Warner, Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self, Oxford University Press, 2002.

In this study of images of blending, shape shifting and splitting in European culture from Ovid to Lewis Carroll, Marina Warner dances close to the topics of interest to Magonia, but never quite engages with them. One gets the feeling that she remains imprisoned in the cage of high culture and cannot escape into the world of the masses' imagination. The world of popular culture clearly inspired much of the high art here discussed, whether it is the hell of Dante or the earthly paradise of Hieronymous Bosch. Warner discusses the impact of the zombie on Coleridge, and its construction in modern form by Zora Houston (though William Seabrook got there before her). The zombie with its evocation of ambulatory coma or vegetative state, or the appalling absence of end-stage Alzheimer's, remains one of the most unsettling of images.

The idea of the doppelganger or the mystical second self hints at the splitting of identity. Ideas of splitting emerged in the Gothic but reached fruition in the Victorian period under the joint impact of the new psychology and the new technologies of image capture. One of those captivated by these themes was the fairy story writer and photographer Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). Dodgson's imagination was stirred at the age of nine by a museum display in Warrington Town Hall, one of the those cabinets of curiosities which would have delighted Jan Bondeson, full of weird birds and exotic artefacts. The museum becomes the realm of the imagination. Readers of this book will be surprised to learn that Dodgson in his later years formed a theory of alien encounters, that in addition to our normal consciousness of daylight reason and common sense, there are others: 'The Eerie' (in which , while conscious of actual surroundings [the percipient] is also conscious of the presence of fairies), and a "form of trance in which, while unconscious of actual surroundings, and apparently, asleep he (i.e. his immaterial essence) migrates to other scenes in the actual world, or in Fairyland, and is conscious of the presence of Fairies". For fairies read 'the other' or whatever token of the uncanny you please.

(If that surprises readers they will be astounded to learn that Dodgson, who died in 1898, was among the collectors who was delighted with the purchase of a copy of one of the Cottingley fairy photographs, taken in 1917. Was this through the mediumship of Mrs Leonard one wonders, or a judicious journey down the Daresbury time tunnel, or is that a good entry for the howler of the year competition?) -- Peter Rogerson

American exorcism

Michael W Cuneo. American Exorcism: Expelling Demons in the Land of Plenty, Bantam Books, 2002.

An account of Cuneo's encounters as an 'investigative sociologist' and observer among both Protestant and Catholic exorcists in the USA. Cuneo argues that the exorcism industry has grown into the mainstream of American culture, from a nearly forgotten backwater, following the publicity surrounding the film The Exorcist. The film and subsequent best-selling books such as Malachi Martin's semi-pornographic Hostage to the Devil constructed images of what possession means and how it can be dealt with. Exorcism ministries grew up in a variety of charismatic, evangelical and theologically conservative groups across the United States.

In his searches Cuneo never actually comes across the sort of dramatic events he hears about, such as levitations and heads turning 180 degrees, though there is one occasion where everyone else present swears such a levitation takes place, but Cuneo sees nothing. One of the more rational Catholic exorcists having 'seen' such a levitation himself, now thinks that in some sense his senses were enchanted, and not by demons.

Those coming for exorcism suffer usually from a variety of anxieties; some would no doubt be diagnosed as suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder and others from depressions of various severities. Others just seem to have normal human problems. Indeed the main problem is their quite natural inability to achieve the impossible perfectionist demands of their sub-culture. In this, though it looks traditional, modern day exorcism is very much an integral part of the contemporary therapeutic culture with its presentation of everyone as a victim (it's not me guv, it's the demons), and its own perfectionism. The exorcists summon up dozens of demons to account for every human situation; the psychiatrists have ranges of diagnoses for an equal number of ordinary human situations. Behind both likes a perfectionism in which happiness is not just guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence but mandatory, and if you are not permanently happy and satisfied you have a problem which needs professional help to solve.

If there is a lacuna in this book, it is perhaps the lack of attention to the deeper sociological causes of the exorcism movement. The Exorcist was surely a child of its times; it is no coincidence that its 'victim' is a teenage girl who violates the community's sense of appropriate behaviour; she is sexually aggressive, foul mouthed and dirty, all phenomena of the 1960s youth rebellion. The Exorcist portrays the priest-hero (Cuneo's phrase) as defending traditional religious and social values against disturbing forces, of reinforcing the boundaries of culture against the wild things outside.

Cuneo shows how the image of the priest-hero was attractive to many priests who found their traditional patriarchal role threatened by theological and social liberalism. In the Protestant exorcism groups, there is the equal suspicion that what is really being exorcised is secular modernity itself.

More could have been made of the very high profile of women in many of these groups, as both victims and 'discerners of spirits'. Women also have high profiles in possession cults in other cultures. As victims they can give vent to frustrations and aggressive tendencies repressed by the culture, and blame the demons. As sniffers out of spirits (yes many discerners claim to detect the possessed by their body odour) they can gain power and status in cultures where they are usually expected to be submissive to male authority.

As a good sociologist Cuneo won't pronounce as to whether 'real' demons exist, though readers can form their own opinions. As to exorcism he is ambivalent; as a placebo it may often be of real therapeutic value, but its culture of passing the buck onto the demons and the quick fix solution make him uneasy.

Magonia readers will find many of his insights into the role of popular culture in the promotion of 'deep' beliefs and experiences, and in world view and perception building, applicable across a range of topics.

Pilots and UFOs

Jerome Clark, Strange Skies: Pilot Encounters with UFOs, Citadel Press, New York, 2003. -- Reviewed by John Harney

"At least some UFOs are surely the product of technological intelligence", writes Jerome Clark in the Introduction to this book. By "technological intelligence" he obviously does not mean earthly intelligence, but no one is going to trick him into saying directly and unambiguously that the UFOs come from outer space, making him look like another Donald Keyhoe.

The general quality of UFO reports from pilots can be gauged from Clark's remark that "... two of the most important sightings - both by pilots (Arnold and Chiles-Whitted) in the early UFO era - may have been telling us that this world is no longer ours alone." These two sightings are indeed important, but for historical reasons, for their influence on the course of amateur enthusiasm for UFO reports and professional investigations of them. If these two sightings are indeed among the best, then Clark really does not have much worth writing about - except from a sociological and historical point of view, of course.

A number of explanations have been suggested for the Kenneth Arnold UFO report, most of them rather implausible. However, proponents of this case being a 'real' UFO often ignore or discount the possibility that Arnold's description of the event might perhaps be less than perfectly accurate, or fail to emphasize that Arnold was the only witness and that he claimed to have had other UFO sightings. Ufologists have often been left looking foolish as a result of their uncritical acceptance of testimony uncorroborated by independent witnesses.

A few years ago, Scottish ufologist James Easton suggested that Arnold's UFOs were American white pelicans, a theory which has a certain plausibility if one can accept the idea that Arnold's estimates of speeds and distances might have been very inaccurate. This theory led Jerome Clark to coin the term 'pelicanist', which soon came to be parroted by America's more hysterical and paranoid ufologists whenever anyone suggested a possible mundane explanation for a UFO report.

Clarence Chiles and his co-pilot, John Whitted, saw a "torpedo-shaped" bright object from their plane, flying near Montgomery, Alabama on 24 July 1948. The object was in view for about 5-10 seconds, but the believers have never accepted the official explanation that it was a bolide. As for its importance, Brad Sparks (whose work is greatly admired by Clark) has written on the UFO UpDates mailing list:

"All in all, this just seems rather marginal. Why argue over this case? Don't we have thousands of unexplained cases of longer duration and better circumstances? It is a matter of history more than anything else because it triggered the parallel development of AMC's Aug. 5, 1948, TOP SECRET Estimate of the Situation and Air Force Intelligence's TOP SECRET AIR 203 study."

One of the more preposterous yarns in this book is about an allegedly multi-witness sighting in Puerto Rico of jet aircraft attempting to intercept an enormous triangular UFO. The UFO captured two of the jets and they were never seen again. The report also contains other fantastic details.

No aircraft were reported missing and there was no other evidence to indicate that the alleged incident had actually occurred. Clark admits that: "The seemingly impressive witness testimony notwithstanding, the story makes no sense on its face." However, he also asserts that the principal investigator of this case, Jorge Martin "is not a man known to conjure up tall tales". Perhaps not, perhaps he just exaggerates them a bit? It makes them more interesting. One wonders if Clark has read any of Martin's other UFO stories. Perhaps a reinvestigation by persons entirely independent of Jorge Martin and friends might possibly clarify the matter?

The book is an interesting summary of UFO reports in volving aircraft, but is mainly of historical rather than scientific interest. Clark's attempts to add a touch of mystery to the stories should perhaps not be taken too seriously. -- John Harney

Communion Letters

Whitley and Anne Streiber. The Communion Letters. Pocket Books 1998. Reviewed by Kevin McClure. From Magonia 65, November 1998

If, as is probably quite reasonable, we look at the belief in alien abduction as being one of the signs of the existence of a de facto religious movement, then Whitley Strieber is its leader and exemplar. For those of us who write and research critically into abductions, others may appear more important. For us, Hopkins, Mack and Jacobs are the key figures, because they set out the ever-widening parameters for the alien experience, challenging our concepts of logic, reason, and evidence in the process. But Hopkins, Mack and Jacobs are not - explicitly at any rate - abduction experiencers.

Strieber, on the other hand, is the experiencer par excellence, the man apparently chosen by the aliens, his 'others', to make the abduction experience known to the world. He is the mystic among the leaders of the abduction movement, the visionary, the high priest. The other three are, to those who believe, mere analysts, theologians: the Inquisition or Opus Dei of the abduction faith. Respected but not revered.

Strieber has, from the outset, sought to bring others into his system of experience and belief, and has more than succeeded in that aim. In The Communion Letters he thanks "the nearly two hundred thousand people who have written us describing their own experiences" and presents more than sixty of these accounts. They form a valuable body of source material which will inform any analysis of the abduction issue.

They can also, almost all, be analysed and interpreted in the tradition of mystical religious experience, and contain identifiable elements of astral projection/OOBE, theosophical concepts, and spiritualism, deriving from the pre-abduction background of the experiencers. The influence of Strieber and the post-1980 abduction mythos is apparent from the outset in some accounts, but more frequently it overlays perceived experiences pre-existing, or even substantially different to, alien abduction. This process illustrates two important points for those investigating individual perceptions of anomalous experience.

The first is very psychosocial, very Magonia. That the perception of, and explanations accepted as causing, such experiences can be moulded and revised in accordance with popular, accessible explanations that were not even invented when that experience took place.

The second point is more complex, more challenging. That there is little to be gained - for sceptics or believers - by studying any one type or period of perceived anomalous experience in isolation, because the general experience seems to occur anyway, regardless of time or place, only shaped and explained by prevalent psychosocial factors. I have long thought that the continuity, the persistence of anomalous experience, from God and Devil to Spirit to Other/Alien, with its underpinning 'travelling' (Heaven, Hell, Faerie-Land, Sabbat, Spirit World, OBE, RV, abduction) motifs, is potentially the strongest argument against the reality of any one particular element of the range. But putting that argument effectively presents major difficulties.

Because we are neither believers nor experiencers ourselves, believers and experiencers will not listen to us, or accept our challenge to what they know to be true. Until one or more of the abductee priesthood recants, few of its followers will feel the need, or have the confidence, to do the same. And until then, Strieber will continue to transmute anomalies into abductions, through an alchemy of belief that is nowhere better demonstrated than in this book.

UFOs: the age of innocence!

Dewayne B. Johnson and Kenn Thomas. Flying Saucers over Los Angeles, with commentary by David Hatcher Childress. Adventures Unlimited, 1998.

Eric and Leif Nesheim. Saucer Attack: Pop Culture in the Age of Flying Saucers Kitchen Sink Press, 1997.

Two treats for 1950's nostalgia fans; the work by Johnson is a reprint of his unpublished 1950 thesis 'Flying Saucers, Fact or Fiction', a Masters thesis in journalism at UCLA written in August 1950, making it the second UFO book ever written, after Keyhoe's Flying Saucers Are Real, but before Scully's Behind the Flying Saucers. Johnson's however never got published. It consists of chapter abstracting various news clippings, then interviews with believers, sceptics and a study of the psychosocial aspects of the reports. Johnson concludes flying saucers are real, but more probably American than Martian. The main interest may lie in his portrayal of, the nervy almost paranoid Ken Arnold, strumming on the desk while being interviewed to avoid his voice being recorded (He perhaps had reason to be paranoid, the journalist concerned was secretly recording him).

What we get here is almost UFOs before ufology, though some of the themes were already coalescing The image of the flying saucer itself was still fluid, and indeed Johnson concluded that the 'real' flying saucers were the cylindrical things such as allegedly seen by Chiles and Whitted and that Arnold saw something like weather balloons.

As early as 1950, some of the themes that Magonia has promoted were being commented on, for example that the Navy School of Aviation Medicine had already determined that staring too long at a fixed light could induce vertigo and a kind of hypnosis in which pilots could dog-fight with stars or mistake ground lights for other aircraft, flying saucers or whatever, and even have outright hallucinations: "when a flyer starts chasing an illuminated weather balloon or star and vertigo and hypnosis sets in, the pilot can come down and practically tell you how many rivets were on the nose of that Martian space ship". In the chapter on the psycho-social aspects he reports on some pretty sophisticated speculation for 1950.

We can see this fascination in the wide range of excellent visual material in the Neshiems' book, which considers flying saucers and space invaders as a topic of pop art and kitsch. Colour illustrations from book jackets, magazine covers, (both UFO and SF), film posters and publicity material, and a wide range of toys. There is a model flying saucer from the mid 1950's with a green, large headed, small bodied pilot, who must have been based on the Mekon. There is the cover from a 1960 paperback edition of The Midwich Cuckoos, which features a pair of glowing disembodied eyes, as reported by Barney Hill. There is the 1957 Jack Davis drawing depicting a crashed saucer, half buried in the New Mexico desert, which is virtually identical to some of the claimed Roswell testimony descriptions. Which came first (did anyone ever ask Davis, or did he die long before the modern Roswell legend started)

What emerges from both these books is the extent to which the flying saucer imagery and mythos permeated everyday life. One did not have to read flying saucer books and magazines to know what flying saucers looked like (It was the same in Britain. I dimly remember being on a kiddies' flying-saucer ride in Lewis's department store in Manchester when I was very small, must be 1953-55, long before I knew that flying saucers were mysterious).

The Neshiems see the pop culture of flying saucers as reflecting the anxieties of the age of the cold war, in which Martians and Communists were virtually interchangeable. As Johnson finished his thesis, he reported the start of the Korean war, and his fear that the cold war was going to get hot. His name never reappeared in connection with ufology, and Thomas and Childress were unable to track him down. Could it be that he, a young man in 1950, was destined to be one of the victims of that conflict? -- Reviewed by Peter Rogerson, from Magonia 65, November 1998

Culture of Fear

Frank Furedi. The Culture of Fear: Risk Taking and the Morality of Low Expectation. Cassell, 1997. -- Reviewed by Peter Rogerson. From Magonia 65, November 1998.

While on the face of it this critique of the contemporary culture of caution, vulnerability and fear may not appear to have much connection with the main topics of Magonia, the discussion is in fact very relevant, for the fears that we are studying are in many ways the (il)logical extension of the fears of wider society. Furedi sees a society whose icons are no longer heroes, or examples of courage, endurance and fortitude, but 'the vulnerable' and 'the victim', a world in which both nature, technology and other human beings are seen not as sources of strength and joy, but as risks and dangers. Even the sun, which virtually all previous human cultures have seen as the source of life and hope is seen primarily as a bringer of cancer, and human beings are seen simultaneously as both weak and dangerous, in need of custodianship.

In this climate we are never perceived as safe. Furedi notes that neighbours, once seen as a source of strength and comradeship, are now seen as a danger, particularly to children. The home and family, once refuges from the insecure world, are now themselves seen as a source of threat. We can see that in this climate the fantasy threats of Satanic abusers and alien abductors and feral strange beasts, are a distillation of these fears. The ordinary hides the nameless threat; if the home is no place of safety, then not even being alone behind locked, padlocked doors and shuttered windows can protect you from the grey meanies The users and abusers can come through the walls for you.

This climate, in which all human motivation is suspect, provides a fertile soil for the growth of the conspiracy theories which we have studied. THEY are all liars, trying to do us down, hiding things from us, being in league with the terrifying forces of change.

Furedi argues that as social consensus morality fractures, medicine becomes the new morality; instead of conduct being described as immoral or wicked, it can be condemned and restrained by being described as 'risky' or 'unsafe', while whole ranges of human behaviour are medicalised. Differences among human beings can no longer be accepted or indeed celebrated as part of the natural human condition, instead departures from an idealised norm become syndromes to be treated. Human beings are no longer seen as morally autonomous beings, but as passive victims of either past trauma, or of their genes and hormones.

Ultimately these fears will consume even themselves. The cult of the therapist leads inevitably to the therapist becoming one more threat. Thus people in the false memory debate, have never, you understand, made up tales of 'abuse' to get back at parents they at whom they feel inarticulate anger because their lives are not the wonderful happy ones seen in adverts. Oh no, they said these things 'because a therapist made me do it'. Once again they can become passive victims.

Some idea of where this sort of thing will end is shown in the recent advice given by the Local Government Association to teachers, that they should not rub suncream on children's arms and legs for fear of being accused of child abuse. The fears that children cannot go out in the sun without being covered in creams which add to the profits of the multinational pharmaceutical companies come in direct collision with the fear that any one who touches a child must be a paedophile. Our fears cancel each other out and reduce us to impotence.

Electric UFOs

Albert Budden. Electric UFOs; Fireballs, Electromagnetics and Abnormal States. Blandford, 1998. -- Reviewed by John Rimmer. From Magonia 65, November 1998.

We live in an era of fear, as Frank Furedi points out in his book reviewed elsewhere by Peter Rogerson. Our lives seem to be dominated by scares about food, pollution, crime, sunshine, passive smoking, the air we breathe; almost anything it seems is potentially threatening. It is not surprising then that Albert Budden presents us with a new, all-pervasive and absolutely inescapable scare. We can eat only organic vegatables grown in our own back garden, forsake alcohol and meat, take our children to and from school in armoured four-wheel drive vehicles, cover ourselves in factor-80 suncream anytime we set foot outdoors and wave our arms around frantically making ineffectual flapping movements whenever we see anyone smoking within
five hundred yards of us. But it is to no avail.

Our whole environment is awash with electromagnetic waves, from radio and TV transmitters, mobile phones, power plants, kitchen equipment, electric motors and a million other sources of 'electromagnetic pollution'. And short of living our whole lives inside a Faraday Cage (and surely someone is) there is nothing at all we can do about it. Now, lots of people take electromagnetic pollution seriously. It has been claimed in court (unsuccessfully, however) that the presence of high-voltage underground cables in a London suburb led to in increase in cases of leukemia amongst local children. There is even an organisation called the Powerwatch Network set up to monitor and promote such claims. And, on the face of it, it does not seem an entirely unreasonable idea that close proximity to very large currents of electricity might have some effect on human biology.

But that, surely, is the point: very close, very large currents. Budden goes much further than this and seems to be stating that almost any sort of electrical energy can have an enormous effect on biological and physical systems. Not the least of these is a propensity for making humans believe they have been abducted by aliens, quite apart from a purely phtysical phenomena in the atmosphere. These events occur in what Budden calls 'hotspots', where a combination of electromagnetic effects overlap and reinforce each others' strengths. the only problem is that almost everywhere seems to be a hotspot by the author's reckoning.

Besides UFOs, the EM effect also allegedly causes poltergeist phenomena. Budden reexamines the most famous British polt case, at Enfield. Here he finds a wealth of electromagnetic sources: the local railway line, power lines, a reservoir (?), a sub-station in a neighbour's front garden, and the fact that the location is equidistant from Stansted and Luton airports. Now Luton and Stansted are 27 miles apart and both 20 miles from Enfield. If the air control radars at these two airports can produce effects at that distance such as wrenching iron radiators off walls and throwing bricks around rooms, I'll make sure that I use Gatwick for my holiday flights from now on!

The fact is that almost anywhere in Britain, Europe and most of North America, and large parts of the rest of the world, is going to have a high level of electromagnetic activity. I am writing these words at a computer which is pouring out energy, a CD player is going away in the background, electric trains pass every few minutes about a hundred yards away, power cables
run to dozens of houses and flats all around me. And I'm sure where you're reading these words it's not much different.

Budden explains this by claiming that some people display electromagnetic hypersensitivity, so EM waves effect them more than others. This may be the case, although it would appear that such an ailment is recognised by very few doctors, and those that do recognise and treat it seem to be clustered around the Breakspear Hospital which features prominently in this, as in Budden's earlier book. EM sensitivity does not however explain the physical, `poltergeist effects Budden credits to EM
'hotspots'.

And this, of course, brings us on to Mr Hutchison and the poltergeist machine, about which I was so scathing in Magonia a year or so back. I had hoped that this book would, as Albert Budden promised me, show positive proof of the effectiveness of this machine, but his account here takes us no further. We are told about investigations by the Max Planck Institute, McDonnell Douglas and Los Alamos, but are shown no evidence of these or their findings. Instead we get more gee-whizz accounts of blocks of concrete bursting into flames, spontaneous metal bending, levitating yoghurt and the rest of it. These events often seem to occur "unexpectedly at remote locations". How inconvenient. On one occasion some potential investors were coming to examine the machine: "On the morning of a demonstration for them it blew one of its own transformers apart" - how very inconvenient.

However, I must not say too much about Mr Hutchison's Amazing Machine, because, as Budden tells us, I will be "haunted for years to come" by my dismissive attitude, "as responses [to my article] from scientists from America, Canada and Europe already indicate". Needless to say I have not seen any of these responses.

Amongst the effects ascribed to EM pollution are the appearance and disappearance of large volumes of water. A number of physical and psychological effects are also apparently caused by EM pollution in hotspots to hypersensitive individuals, including one symptom I found particularly interesting. He describes people suffering from what he calls 'the religiose [sic.] outlook': "Another form seems to be quasi-scientific in theme, and such preoccupations are displayed as a strange non-stop, almost involuntary rambling, usually concerned with how science has taken a fundamentally wrong turning in its history, and how they can correct this with their convoluted theories and outlandish concepts".

Does this remind you of anyone? Answers on a postcard, please.

Big Cats in Britain

Marcus Matthews. Big Cats Loose in Britain. CFZ Press, 2007
Mark Fraser (editor). Big Cats in Britain Yearbook 2007. CFZ Press, 2007.
Reviewed by Peter Rogerson, from Magonia 98, September 2008.

Next to ghosts, mystery big cats are probably the most in-fashion Fortean phenomena in Britain today, and their hunting continues much of the open air adventure holiday atmosphere of the old style sky-watches. Like most Fortean phenomena they are heavy on ‘eyewitness testimony’ and short on unambiguous physical evidence. Fraser devotes 190 pages of his book to Big Cat accounts from Britain in 2006 alone, month by month. Much of Williams’ book, originally compiled by him as a 14 year old schoolboy in 1987, is filled with similar reports.

These stories have been going on for over 40 years now, since the Surrey Puma epidemic of 1964, and the sheer numbers of reports make any ‘paws and pelts’ explanation very difficult to entertain. There are various such explanations, ranging from Di Francis’s claim that they are a lost native species, Marcus Williams’s that they are descendants of exotic cats imported by the Romans, to the belief that they are modern releases in the countryside.

The first two of these hypotheses really stumble on the lack of historical evidence. If there really were big cats in medieval times, like boars, bears and wolves they would have been hunted for sport, probably to extinction. No doubt the hunting of the largest cats would have been the exclusive prerogative of the King and his close favourites and special dogs would have been bread for the task.

Modern releases made sense in the 1970s, after the passing of the Dangerous Wild Animals Act, but 30 years on? We would have to assume some kind of ongoing conspiracy to import exotic cats from around the world and release them into the English countryside for the sheer hell of it. This would be a much more dangerous hoax than the manufacture of crop circles. While not impossible - we should never set any limits to the depths of human stupidity and recklessness - it doesn’t seem very probable. There are no confessions and again practically no physical evidence.

Indeed reading these books, one sees just how similar to other Fortean phenomena they are, the physical evidence is always ambiguous: the marks on the ground which might be paw prints, the photographs which always show a blob in the background and never close detail, the animal kills and mutilations, the appeal to eyewitness authority (X is a real country person who couldn’t possibly mistake a large domestic cat or a dog for a puma etc.). There are stories of road kills, but always the corpse mysteriously disappears or is inadvertently disposed of. There are even tales of mysterious white vans coming to collect the bodies, no doubt to transport them in black helicopters to the underground facility where they keep the stuffed aliens.

Given this background it is not surprising that some people evoke the supernatural or wild ufological phantoms, but that is definitely a route to be resisted. The most probable explanation of such reports, is that while a very small proportion probably do refer to genuine escapes, releases, the vast majority are misidentifications and misperceptions of large pussy cats either homed or feral and a variety of dogs, As I have noted before, the real phenomenon or phenomena are the processes by which people loose the sense of what they are looking at.

The mystery cat, the alien big cat is a myth for our age, a vision of wildness intruding on what we conceive as the tamed world. They have a kind of green feeling about them, there is something romantic about the idea of wild nature having some last surprise, such that even England’s green and pleasant land contains some beast of the ultimate wild. There are other darker echoes, the big cats and coming towards the suburbs of the great cities. The city was once seen as the citivas whose walls protected its inhabitants from the wild terrors outside, now cities are themselves seen as savage and wild places, urban jungles, fit places for jungle beasts to roam. Then have you noticed how many melanistic leopards - ‘black panthers’ - are reported, compared with the much more common spotted leopard. Along with tawny pumas, not many snow-white cats or striped tigers. Like the Greys in the flying saucers these are exotic, alien, foreigners, at once alluring and menacing, images of the ‘other’. Is it significant that these stories began at a time of mass immigration, and are now resurging at another time of mass fears over ‘the others’?

Are we then going to see these connections more explicit, with tabloid claims of exotic big cats being smuggled into Britain through the Channel Tunnel by gangs of Romanian gypsies?

Sight Unseen

Budd Hopkins and Carol Rainey, Sight Unseen: Science, UFO Invisibility and Transgenic Beings, Atria Books, New York, 2003. Reviewed by John Harney, from Magonia Supplement 49, February 2004.

There are several reasons why the work of Budd Hopkins attracts criticism and the principal one is the fact that he evidently regards abduction narratives as being true accounts of real, physical events. In his book on the Linda Napolitano abduction case, this led to all manner of absurdities, including the then secretary-general of the United Nations being asked some very silly questions. This new book is just as crazy, even though his wife, Carol Rainey, has attempted to give it a veneer of respectability by giving snippets of information about developments in applied science and arguing that the fantastic details of UFO abduction stories are not in conflict with basic scientific principles.

Hopkins insists that UFO encounter reports are not the results of hallucinations, sleep paralysis, or hoaxes. "The skilled UFO researcher has learned how to identify such mundane explanations, thus avoiding pursuit of any vague, dubious, and unsupported accounts." The main problem here is that the abductees get to know what Hopkins expects of them. If he considers their cases important they are repeatedly questioned, as well as some of them attending his abductee support group.

We are told that: "Out of the mass of credible reports that remain, the supporting physical, medical and photographic evidence is so consistent that none of the debunkers' psychological or psychosocial theories can begin to explain it away. Over the years, for better or for worse, I have come to believe that UFO abductions are real, event-level occurrences." Of course, physical, medical and photographic evidence does exist in connection with many of these stories, but, as Hopkins carefully avoids pointing out, there are always mundane explanations which can be considered to account for such evidence.

What appears to be a new departure for Hopkins is his discussion of extraordinary accounts, which do not fit in with the rather stereotyped abduction narrative which he has developed in co-operation with David Jacobs and a few other investigators. This time he gives us some stories reminiscent of John Keel's The Mothman Prophecies. He doesn't mention Keel of course, as he is an "unperson" in certain sections of American ufology.

These stories are interesting, but Hopkins's determination to take them as being accurate accounts of real physical events results in much absurd theorising and pseudoscientific speculation. One of them concerns the abductee Katharina Wilson who told Hopkins about an occasion when she flew from Portland, Oregon to Chicago to speak at a UFO conference. Two of the organisers of the conference had arranged to meet her at the airport. Although her plane was on time she was about an hour late in meeting the organisers. Hopkins, of course, attributes this "missing time" to a probable abduction, with the result that the story becomes more convoluted and complicated than the original report. It seems that Wilson started to feel somewhat confused while still on the plane. When she got off she visited the women's toilet near the gate and allegedly had trouble washing her hands. The washbasins had automatic taps operated by sensors, but when she put her hand under them nothing happened, although the other women there had no trouble. She felt panicky and asked a woman: "Am I invisible or something?" The woman did not answer, which she thought very odd, though the most likely explanation is that the woman thought she was crazy.

Two chapters are devoted to discussing this case, one written by Hopkins and the other obviously by his wife who writes: "In looking at Katharina Wilson's troubling, confusing experience at O'Hare Airport, we may speculate about an abduction, or a changeable human energy field, even the possibility of teleportation, although we currently possess a limited knowledge of such subjects." So it seems we can indulge in any sort of fantastic speculation apart from the obvious one that Wilson was suffering from one of her mental fugues which caused her to lose an hour by wandering around aimlessly. This story will cause more sensible readers to wonder, not about a "changeable human energy field" (whatever that might be), but whether Wilson is fit to be allowed out on her own.

As for the taps, Carol Rainey did some research on these devices but probably didn't manage to get details of all the variations on the theme of taps and other plumbing items worked by sensors. She has assumed that the taps in the toilet visited by Katharina Wilson were operated by holding one's hands under them, but I have encountered a design in which the sensor is let into the tiles above the basin and you have to touch it to turn the tap on. If they were of this type and if Wilson, in her confused state, failed to notice, then this explains the phenomenon. But don't tell Hopkins, as he doesn't like mundane explanations.

We also have the fascinating story of the "phantom support group", which is supported by "four credible witnesses". These witnesses were actually two married couples, and Hopkins interviewed the two men separately and the two women together. Hopkins tells us that the accounts he received agreed with one another but he doesn't give us the separate accounts; we are merely given his interpretation of what he was told. Also, the alleged events had taken place some years previously.

It is said that two ufologists, "Dennis" and "Don" had produced a videotape of their investigation of an abduction case in their area and had presented it at a meeting which was open to the public and was attended by 15 to 20 people. A week later they received a call from a man who said he had been at the meeting, and he invited them to a meeting of his abductee support group.

This was a very odd meeting, in an apartment block, where Dennis, Don and their wives were greeted by "a very strange 'blank-looking', rather short man . . . " The other people present were also described as "blank-looking". The leader of the group berated Don for making the video of the abduction investigation. When questioned he claimed never to have heard of Budd Hopkins or David Jacobs.

One of the strange persons present at the meeting was a "mannequin like female whom they regarded as almost unnaturally beautiful". She suddenly stood up. "As she did so, both men said that she seemed to metamorphose into an incredibly ugly, inhuman-looking creature with large eyes and sparse hair. It was this metamorphosis that triggered their speedy exit from the apartment."

This is all very strange, and very interesting if taken as an example of modern folklore, although Hopkins obviously expects us to believe that the incident really happened as described. However, there are certain details which one would reasonably expect to see included in such a story. Why are we not told the name of the town where the incident took place? Why is there no mention of any attempt being made to identify the owner of the apartment or the person who rented it on the day of the incident? Who are these keen ufologists who sell videos and hold public meetings but insist on remaining incognito in the story?

We are told that the incident occurred in the "early 1990s", so there has been plenty of time for confabulation, in addition to Hopkins's editing of the accounts into a smoothly written narrative. This would not matter if the authors did not regard this as a description of a real event. They just cannot see how their total rejection of the psychosocial approach to such narratives gives rise to absurd speculations masquerading as scientific theories.

There is much more that could be written about Hopkins's technique of interpreting the weirdest UFO narratives literally, in defiance of basic scientific principles and common sense. No doubt he will respond to criticism of this book as he did with his account of the Napolitano case (Witnessed), either by ignoring it, or by indulging in character assassinations of his more persistent critics.

Visions and Apparitions

Hilary Evans. Visions: Apparitions: Alien Visitors. Aquarian Press, 1984. Reviewed by Kevin McClure

I'm hardly going to have to introduce Hilary Evans to regular readers of Magonia. If he were older (or acted older!) he could be the elder statesman of British ufology, but he's still too lively for that, and his influence stretches further, for his roots don't lie in ufology as you'll know if your read his Intrusions. His newest book is an elegant exposition of the range of his knowledge. It is the finest and most comprehensive survey and analysis of the range of entity experience yet published in English. I'll go further, its the best book in the paranormal research field since the classic works that arose from the collected cases of the SPR in the early part of this century.

It is also a classic, in the mould of Myers's Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death et al but written with the advantages of modern communications, a vastly increased range of sources, and one of the finest private collections of books in the world. Few writers could have access to better source material.

But it's what you do with source material that matters. What has been done here is that accounts of a cross-section of all types of entity experience have been organised into "a field survey" in which people "seem to see a more-or-less human-like figure which there are good reasons for believing is not as 'real' as it seems to be". Or to use the title the author originally chose, changed for some peculiar reason to that now used, a detailed study of 'The Entity Enigma', extending to 309 pages of smallish print, plus a good bibliography/references, and illustrations.

There have been previous such attempts, not all by any means unsuccessful. The ones that spring to mind most readily are the 'new ufology' paperbacks of the mid 1970's - The Unidentified, The Haunted Universe, UFOs, the Psychic Solution, etc; really exciting and highly influential in their time. They took a wide range of apparently spontaneous - and mostly humanoid - phenomena and attempted to build up a cosmology from them; the source material from which they worked was interesting and original, but the actual theories have mostly been debunked since - in several cases by the authors themselves.

Perhaps the key to Hilary's success in dealing with this most complex of all phenomena is his ready acceptance of what I now regard as the first real law of paranormal research - there are no facts. Or, to quote:

"In the course of this study I shall be citing a great many case histories by way of example. Let us face the fact here and now that virtually every one of these cases is purely anecdotal, comprising witness testimony to an event for which that testimony comprises the only evidence. It is not unlikely that one or more of these cases is in one way or another spurious: I have reported them as they were reported by the percipient, but I would not care to say of any single case that it is beyond question genuine."

The book is written on the principle that, evidence of deliberate fraud being uncommon, the entity experience is generally real to the percipient, in that a sequence of perceived events occur, and cannot be readily avoided or ignored. That is a very different approach from that of Vallee, Keel, Clark, Hopkins, Randles and so on where the experiences are so recounted and framed that it is unavoidable that in climaxing the book theories and explanation for probably subjective experiences have to be conjored from nowhere, and almost always spoil the careful narrative and assessment that predeeds them.

Given that no single case is beyond question, rigid conclusions must be - and are - avoided. More so than in the author's Evidence for UFOs where I feel that pressure of space led to too decisive and apparent esposal of the ETH - one not repeated in this later book. It would be difficult to communicate the breadth of the content without reprinting the contents page, so suffice it to say all usual lines of approach are there, and are complemented by assesments of the doppelganger, of 'companions and counsellors' providing surprise ways out of sticky situations, and coverage of 'experimental' entities including age-regression, practical magic, seances, hallucinogenic experience, and the creation of thoughtforms. And in first place amongst these the important evidence involving sleep and dreamrelated experience, which this author has done much to bring to public notice in recent years.

He freely acknowledges the influence of David Hufford's The Terror that Comes in the Night on both structure and content of this book, and his evidence confirms the importance of the state of awareness and wakefulness in the origins of many types of entity experience.

The author's knowledge of possible theories and explanations appears to be as comprehensive as his knowledge of - and access to - significant but often less than famous cases. Ideas and lines of thought are introduced throughout the narrative, and are brought together in a diligently crafted concluding section of over 60 pages.

Most of the sensible ideas I've ever heard are in there somewhere, discussed as a succession of hypotheses, then brought together logically, primarily drawing conclusions about the nature of our minds and perceptions that are unorthodox, but far from unreasonable. Then moving on to suggest that there is some evidence for the influences of an external agent or intelligence, though this could be explained away given further developments in our own knowledge and understanding.

Just as in its time you would not have been able to find a more clear and comprehensive account of evidence suggestive of individual survival of death than Myers's book, so you will not, yet, find a better account than this of the evidence suggestive of humans having dealings with non-human entities, over a very prolonged period, in every part of the world. That to me is the real achievement of this book. It has done a great deal of work for us - structuring evidence of different but related kinds into a cohesive whole, to which we can go on and relate our own research, and our reviews of research and investigation. If you like, some of the material here can be represented by very large and exotic mathematical expressions, but the common factor between all those grand and mysterious numbers is a relatively small and simple one - the range and ability of the individual human mind, of which, so far, we have remarkably little understanding. And without an understanding of the small numbers we're never going to get to grips with the big ones.

This book, marketed correctly, could sell very well as a paperback. It is eminently readable, attractively presented, and readily understood by anyone with a decent education and a modicum of imagination. I hope the publishers will change the title, put some money into publicity, and get on with selling it. It will do much for the credibility of our subject, and for those of us working within it.

Looking at the Moon

Scott Montgomery, The Moon and the Western Imagination, University of Arizona Press, 1999. Reviewed by Martin Kottmeyer.

While I had some awareness of parts of this story, Montgomery has pulled together a seemingly comprehensive history of thinking about the nature of the Moon from the Greeks up to the fixing of the names of features on the Moon. There’s not much here about thinking on the subject of life on the moon - no fault of the author - but there is rather more about whether the Moon is somehow a world like the Earth or not.

I’m not going to re-tell all the contents beyond saying the ideas were quite varied before the modern era. There is, however, one point about this history which I found quite astonishing. There were no attempts at photo-realistic depictions of the Moon until 1420-5. This is odd in several ways. First, the technology of painting goes back thousands of years and there was plenty of talent even in the days of cave-art. In ancient Greece, we have a bounty of detailed work particularly in the realistic depiction of the human body, a suitably complex subject. The Greeks knew the moon existed and we see it represented in illustration work as a round body. But there is no effort to make an accurate sketch of the face of the moon though they realised it was more than merely round but had some sort of spottiness to its appearance. There is no fundamental obstacle against some artist just sketching the moon as it appears. Why then didn’t someone?

Montgomery is surely right that Van Eyck was the first because there was a growing trend to detail-work about virtually everything in Nature in this period and Van Eyck was particularly adept and prolific in this sort of detailed photo-realistic art. Yet, there is a nagging question how it is nobody before him even attempted a casual sketch that historians can find. The moon after all was hardly unimportant. People tracked it and made it a basis of time keeping. The moon is helpful in hunting at night and allows one to forage, garden, and see friends and enemies. People had seen the spots and imagined faces, rabbits, and people in the shapes of the spots. Yet, nobody thought to draw it realistically.