This might interest any readers of this blog with an interest in mysticism and history. I’ve been reading, off and on, Tony McAleavy’s The Last Witch Craze: John Aubrey, the Royal Society and the Witches (Amberley: 2022). This is about how individual members of the Royal Society, set up to advance science, and the 17th century naturalist and biographer John Aubrey, investigated cases of witchcraft scientifically as part of a project to combat the threat of atheism. They were afraid that the rise of the new mechanical philosophy denied the existence of disembodied spirits and so led to atheism. But this in turn could be challenged by properly investigated cases of witchcraft, hauntings and what would now be considered poltergeists, supported by the testimony of reliable multiple witnesses.
Aubrey himself, the author of Brief Lives, a series of potted biographies of the great men of his time, and books on the natural history and customs of his native Wiltshire and other counties, was a practising ritual magicians, though also friends with Thomas Hobbes, who denied the existence of the supernatural and was suspected of atheism. The Royal Society had no corporate opinion on witchcraft, but individual members were staunch believers, writing and publishing books about it. One of these was Robert Boyle, whose book The Sceptical Chymist, founded the modern science of chemistry. Boyle was deeply Christian, and left a legacy to fund an annual sermon preaching Christianity against atheism. But as a scientist and man of faith, he was also interested in the possibility of the existence of disembodied spirits on other worlds and stars, and the theological implications of their existence.
‘Robert Boyle thought a lot about the supernatural. Not only was he sure about the reality of angels and demons, he also speculated on the possible existence of enormous numbers of spirits of other types, ‘an inestimable multitude of Spiritual Beings , of various kinds.’ Distant planets and stars might contain alien spirits about which we know nothing. There could be spirits inhabiting ‘all the Celestial Globes (very many of which do vastly exceed ours in bulk)’. This raised, for Boyle, interesting theological questions. Angels and demons were known to be saved or damned, respectively, but in other worlds there might be spirits who were still being tested by God, just as Adam and Eve were tested in the Garden of Eden.’ (p. 69).
There’s a link, or a chain of belief here with the Swedenborgians of the 18th century, who believed that the planets were inhabited and that they could travel to them in spirit and communicate with their inhabitants during seances. I think they also believed that people also travelled to these worlds and made their homes on them after death. Some of the Spiritualist mediums believed this. And Evans-Wentz records the view of an elderly Irish mystic in his book, The Fairy Faith in the Celtic Countries, that the fairies were an old race come from the stars.
And this also continues into the UFO phenomenon. I am not going to start a debate over whether all alien encounters are mystical in nature rather than encounters with real, nuts and bolts craft, whether alien spaceships or secret terrestrial aircraft. But there have been UFO encounters which do seem to be either hallucinatory or mystical in nature. One Australian woman was abducted and examined in an alien spacecraft on a deserted road one night. When she was taken back there by a member of an Ozzie UFO investigation group, she had another such experience. But she was still physically present with the investigator in his car, and no UFO was visible. Other experiencers have said that there abduction was an astral or out of body experience, rather than physical. Sceptics have suggested that UFO abduction experiences can be explained by Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. Some no doubt can, but others have occurred to seemingly normal individuals with no history of such a neurological illness.
I therefore wonder if Boyle was right after all, and this type of alien encounters are with disembodied alien spirits, which our brains interpret as physical alien beings in real nuts and bolts craft in order to make it comprehensible.
Okay, we all know exactly who Paul Joseph Watson is and what he stands for. He’s the far right YouTuber and conspiracy theorist who was fellow conspiracy nutter Alex Jones’ British buddy over on Infowars before he split with him and returned to Blighty. He, along with Sargon of Gasbag and Count Dankula, brought down UKIP when they joined at the invitation of Gerald Batten. All the genuinely liberal, anti-racist members, who just hated the EU but not immigration and people of colour, complained and left, and the party imploded. But here the old adage about stopped clocks being right twice a day is probably right. And I’m going to give him his due credit.
Remember the brouhaha last year when someone blew up the Northstream pipeline or whatever it’s called, carrying Russian oil into Europe? Fingers have been pointed very firmly at Putin and Russia. But according to Watson, the American investigative reporter Seymour Hersh has found instead that it was the Americans. The bombs were supposedly planted during a NATO exercise in July last year by divers, and then detonated three months later by a sonar buoy. The purpose was to increase Europe’s dependency on American oil and prolong the war in Ukraine.
I don’t believe in the conspiracy theories peddled by Infowars, stupid, tabloid tales of 4-dimensional aliens, or demons, and how Barack Obama is the antichrist and Hillary Clinton a cyborg, the Democrats are imprisoning children in pizza parlours to be raped and abused at their conventions and the rest of the nonsense. But real conspiracies do exist, and Lobster has been covering them since the magazine was founded in the 1980s. This has the ring of truth about it, especially as the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine which ousted the pro-Russian president was arranged by the American state department and the National Endowment for Democracy. And then there’s the story that the Ukrainian president was about to negotiate a peace deal until Johnson turned up to encourage them to carry on fighting. And it’s been confirmed that the Iraq invasion was about the West stealing the country’s oil. The information about the pipeline also comes from Seymour Hersh, who I think is a very well respected journalist rather than some kind of right-wing mouthpiece and fearmonger.
Watson’s therefore, in my opinion, right about this one, and also right about the way the story has been overshadowed by the reports of the Chinese spy balloons. It’s a pity that only people like him are noticing this.
I’m reposting this because some of the great contributors on this blog have reported that it’s vanishing from their computers. I honestly can’t think why this should be the case, but here it is again.
‘Trev, one of the many great commenters on this blog, alerted me yesterday to the news that the Americans have claimed to have shot down several UFOs, including one over Alaska. He linked this to a news report that said they were probably balloons. Since then I’ve come across various accounts that contradict this. CNN reported on the incident, stating that the air force pilots said they did not know what they were looking at. One also said that he was unable to work out how it flew. Other details have also emerged. The pilots said it was not like the Chinese spy balloon. One was the size of a car, and another, or perhaps the same one, was cylindrical.
I was reading the comments on one of the YouTubers, who covered this and most of them were sceptical. The obvious question was raised of how an alien spaceship, which was so far ahead of us technologically that it could cross the vast gulfs of interstellar space, could be shot down by us using our limited technology. The majority of commenters smelled a rat. They considered that it was a hoax intended to prepare the way for some kind of totalitarian takeover. One religious individual went further and suggested that it was a disguise for the appearance of the fallen angels and the reign of Lucifer. There was a similar conspiracy theory put forward in the ’90s by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince in their book The Stargate Conspiracy. They claimed that the US government was plotting a totalitarian coup by staging the descent of alien space gods, and connected this with the Nine, a group of discarnate entities contacted by American scientists and psychical researchers, including Andrija Puharich and Uri Geller, in the 1970s. I can’t remember all the details, but the book somehow took in the Egyptian pyramids and Robert K.G. Temple’s The Sirius Mystery, which argued that the Dogon of Mali had been contacted in prehistory by extraterrestrials from the star Sirius. The last thing I heard about their book, it was being claimed that they had intended it as a joke, but that this had been so convincing it went over most people’s heads. I read it, and I have to say that there was nothing in it which suggested it was a spoof.
I do think, however, we have to be very careful with this one. UFO stands for a ‘Unidentified Flying Object’. Although it has entered popular culture as meaning a visiting alien spacecraft, I wonder if, in this case, it means precisely that: a flying object that cannot be identified, but which may not be extraterrestrial. I’ve noticed that recently UFOs have been renamed UAPs – Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, and wondered why that new term wasn’t used instead. Of course it could just be that phenomena can include a purely natural explanation for UFOs. One possible explanation is that they are poorly understood meteorological phenomena like ball lightning. But what the Americans claim to have shot down was structured craft. On the other hand, it could well be some kind of unidentified terrestrial aircraft, and the Americans have described it as UFO in order to play on the ambiguity of the term and suggest it was an alien vehicle when it may well not have been.
Way back in the 90s a book was published claiming that UFO sightings and reports were actually those of drones. The author was a nasty individual with a background in various Fascist groups. It obviously can’t be applied to all UFO sightings, but it’s quite possible that it may explain some. Mark Pilkington in his book Mirage Men describes his interviews with a number of American air force personnel and experts on military aviation, who tell him that top secret aircraft developed by the American military do have the ability to fake a UFO encounter. This includes interfering with airplane’s radar, which can be done using two separate radar beams and has been known about since the 1950s. If the Americans have such technology, then it’s very likely indeed that Russia and China also has it, or something similar. It’s also been clear from Bill Rose’s Flying Saucer Technology (Hersham: Ian Allan Publishing 2011) that countries around the world, including Britain, Germany, America and Russia, have been experimenting with disc-shaped aircraft almost since the invention of powered flight, and some of them look very exotic.
Artist’s rendition of a high-altitude VTOL ramjet developed by Lockheed for the US military for nuclear bombing and reconnaissance missions. from Rose, p. 104.
It’s possible that what was shot down was an terrestrial aircraft of this type, rather than anything from space.
On the other hand, perhaps it really is an alien spacecraft, and the American authorities have decided to hide it in plain sight by calling it as UFO on the understanding that this will cause the sceptics to discount it immediately.
It’ll be very interesting to see what else emerges about these encounters, though it won’t surprise me at all if the story is left to vanish so that we’ll be none the wiser.
Trev, one of the many great commenters on this blog, alerted me yesterday to the news that the Americans have claimed to have shot down several UFOs, including one over Alaska. He linked this to a news report that said they were probably balloons. Since then I’ve come across various accounts that contradict this. CNN reported on the incident, stating that the air force pilots said they did not know what they were looking at. One also said that he was unable to work out how it flew. Other details have also emerged. The pilots said it was not like the Chinese spy balloon. One was the size of a car, and another, or perhaps the same one, was cylindrical.
I was reading the comments on one of the YouTubers, who covered this and most of them were sceptical. The obvious question was raised of how an alien spaceship, which was so far ahead of us technologically that it could cross the vast gulfs of interstellar space, could be shot down by us using our limited technology. The majority of commenters smelled a rat. They considered that it was a hoax intended to prepare the way for some kind of totalitarian takeover. One religious individual went further and suggested that it was a disguise for the appearance of the fallen angels and the reign of Lucifer. There was a similar conspiracy theory put forward in the ’90s by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince in their book The Stargate Conspiracy. They claimed that the US government was plotting a totalitarian coup by staging the descent of alien space gods, and connected this with the Nine, a group of discarnate entities contacted by American scientists and psychical researchers, including Andrija Puharich and Uri Geller, in the 1970s. I can’t remember all the details, but the book somehow took in the Egyptian pyramids and Robert K.G. Temple’s The Sirius Mystery, which argued that the Dogon of Mali had been contacted in prehistory by extraterrestrials from the star Sirius. The last thing I heard about their book, it was being claimed that they had intended it as a joke, but that this had been so convincing it went over most people’s heads. I read it, and I have to say that there was nothing in it which suggested it was a spoof.
I do think, however, we have to be very careful with this one. UFO stands for a ‘Unidentified Flying Object’. Although it has entered popular culture as meaning a visiting alien spacecraft, I wonder if, in this case, it means precisely that: a flying object that cannot be identified, but which may not be extraterrestrial. I’ve noticed that recently UFOs have been renamed UAPs – Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, and wondered why that new term wasn’t used instead. Of course it could just be that phenomena can include a purely natural explanation for UFOs. One possible explanation is that they are poorly understood meteorological phenomena like ball lightning. But what the Americans claim to have shot down was structured craft. On the other hand, it could well be some kind of unidentified terrestrial aircraft, and the Americans have described it as UFO in order to play on the ambiguity of the term and suggest it was an alien vehicle when it may well not have been.
Way back in the 90s a book was published claiming that UFO sightings and reports were actually those of drones. The author was a nasty individual with a background in various Fascist groups. It obviously can’t be applied to all UFO sightings, but it’s quite possible that it may explain some. Mark Pilkington in his book Mirage Men describes his interviews with a number of American air force personnel and experts on military aviation, who tell him that top secret aircraft developed by the American military do have the ability to fake a UFO encounter. This includes interfering with airplane’s radar, which can be done using two separate radar beams and has been known about since the 1950s. If the Americans have such technology, then it’s very likely indeed that Russia and China also has it, or something similar. It’s also been clear from Bill Rose’s Flying Saucer Technology (Hersham: Ian Allan Publishing 2011) that countries around the world, including Britain, Germany, America and Russia, have been experimenting with disc-shaped aircraft almost since the invention of powered flight, and some of them look very exotic.
Artist’s rendition of a high-altitude VTOL ramjet developed by Lockheed for the US military for nuclear bombing and reconnaissance missions. from Rose, p. 104.
It’s possible that what was shot down was an terrestrial aircraft of this type, rather than anything from space.
On the other hand, perhaps it really is an alien spacecraft, and the American authorities have decided to hide it in plain sight by calling it as UFO on the understanding that this will cause the sceptics to discount it immediately.
It’ll be very interesting to see what else emerges about these encounters, though it won’t surprise me at all if the story is left to vanish so that we’ll be none the wiser.
WatchMojo is a YouTube channel that specialises in lists of the most (insert adjective) of whatever subject they’re covering. This is usually popular culture, like films, TV programmes and comics. But in this video from their British offshoot they delve into the very murky world of British tabloid and red top newspapers to discuss the six worst of them. And so, imagine if you will, this run down of the very worst of British journalism accompanied by the old style Top of the Pops theme as that sadly missed programme went down the music charts.
Coming last at No. 6 is the Daily Star for its coverage of weird paranormal stories like black-eyed ghost children, their libelling of the Liverpool fans at the Hillsborough disaster and getting sued by the McCanns for its malign take on the disappearance of their daughter. They also blamed video games for Raoul Moat’s shooting spree, despite the entire lack of evidence showing that video games are responsible for real world violence, and for making up an interview with Duane ‘the Rock’ Johnson.
Coming in at no. 5, pop-pickers, is the Mirror, showing that it’s also left-wing papers that can have appalling low journalistic standards. This is there because of its owner, Robert Maxwell, raiding his employees’ pension funds, and Piers Morgan publishing fake photographs of alleged atrocities by British troops in Iraq. This part of the video shows some of the other headlines from the paper, such as its ‘Achtung! Surrender’ to the Germans at the 1996 World Cup as other illustrations of its lack of taste and anything resembling decent attitudes.
At No. 4 in this chart of journalistic infamy is the Daily Mail, as illustrated by its article ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’ praising Mosley’s BUF and its owner, Lord Rothermere’s trip to Germany and praise of the Nazi regime. The video also states that it’s been suggested that the paper’s pro-appeasement stance convinced Hitler that Britain would not retaliate if he invaded Poland, thus causing World War II. More recently the paper has also been sued for libel or inaccurate reporting by celebs such as Melania Trump, Alan Sugar and Elton John. The video also shows some of its racist headlines opposing the decolonisation of mathematics and opposition to non-White immigration.
The Daily Express is at No. 3, again because of such low points as being sued by the McCanns, scaremongering stories about the world being wiped out by aliens or killer asteroids, and its weird fixation on conspiracy theories about Princess Diana and her death, often at the expense of more current and important stories. In 2010 its editor said that he was appalled by some of the stories it ran, and was going to reign in its islamophobia.
No. 2, the late, unlamented News of the Screws. This was always controversial, but lasted 150 years, even claiming at one time to be the world’s best newspaper. That was until it was brought down by the phone-tapping scandal, whose victims not only included celebrities, royalty like Princes William and Harry, but also murder victims and dead soldiers. It was forced to fold after all its advertisers deserted it.
But the top slot in this catalogue of filth and sleaze merchants is the Scum. This rag’s viciously low reporting has made it notorious around the world, but what foreign viewers may not know is that it’s particularly hated in Britain for its smearing of the Liverpool fans at Hillsborough, like its fellow tabloid the Depress. Instead of the Liverpool fans being responsible for the carnage, it was found that the police were responsible for the 96 deaths. This anti-Liverpool venom is the reason it’s still banned in the city, despite the paper having made some half-hearted apologies afterwards. It also claimed the Birmingham 6, a group of Irish men wrongly imprisoned for an IRA terrorist atrocity, were guilty. On top of this it was also sued for libel by Wayne Rooney. But what makes it especially hated is its staunch support of Margaret Thatcher, the infamous ‘Gotcha!’ headline for the sinking of the Belgrano during the Falklands War, and its claim that it was responsible for Thatcher’s electoral victories with its headline ‘It was the Scum Wot won it’.
Of course this list leaves out some other instances of tabloid wrongdoing. The Scum has had any number of complaints for racism upheld by the former Press Complaints Commission, including one in which it compared Arabs to pigs. Piers Morgan has also been involved in the phone hacking scandal, though it’s possible the video mentions this and I’ve just forgotten it did. And I’d say the worst British tabloid was the Sport in its various editions for its mixture of sleaze, stories about freaks and daft stories following the Weekly World News style of journalism, like its claim that there was a B52 bomber on the Moon. The Sport was set up by David ‘the Slug’ Sullivan, according to Private Eye, a pornographer with convictions for running girls. But the paper has a low circulation compared to the others here, and so is far less influential.
As for the Scum coming first as Britain’s worst tabloid, I agree entirely, although I doubt this is an accolade the Scum would want to boast about on its front page. But when it comes to malign, biased reporting and racism, it is indeed the Scum wot wins it.
Here’s a very short video on the American SR-92 Aurora stealth plane from the Future Machine Tech channel on YouTube. This suggests that Aurora was developed as a black project by the American air force in the 1980s as a replacement for the SR-91 Blackbird spy plane. During the ’90s there were sightings of mysterious UFOs dubbed ‘black triangles’ because of their shape and colour. The Aurora fits this description exactly, and many of the sightings of such UAPs may be of this mysterious, but definitely not extraterrestrial, aircraft. The video mentions a tracking image of it flying across the Pacific on its way to America, probably to touch down at the very top secret research base at Groom Lake, Area 51. The aircraft leaves a very distinctive contrail, which has ben described as ‘doughnuts on a rope’ and may have been tracked flying over Belgium according to an article back in the 90s in the defunct UFO Magazine. I’m putting this video up because I and some of the great commenters on this blog have an interest in UFOs, although we differ in our views of the phenomenon. Some UFO sightings are almost certainly of top secret military aircraft. Others are hoaxes, some of which may be perpetrated by the intelligence agencies for their own purposes, one of which may be the deliberate destabilisation and discrediting of UFO research groups and investigators. Some, as suggested by French-American astronomer and computer scientist Jacques Vallee and the late journalist of the paranormal, John Keel, may be paranormal in origin, beings from other dimensions. Others may be real alien spacecraft. People over here have also had sightings of the Black Triangles, and so it’s quite possible that they’ve quite a glimpse of this classified plane.
I’ve been reading various SF books over the past few days. These have been the collections of classic SF stories edited by the British Library’s Mike Ashley. One of these is a history of British SF in 100 stories. This doesn’t collect the stories themselves, but consists of precis of what he judges to be the 100 best British SF stories. It begins with H.G. Wells, as you’d expect and includes a number of other well-known SF authors from the period, like Aldous Huxley and Brave New World. But there are many others that are now obscure, but seem to be really interesting and sometimes chillingly prescient. For example, the 1918 novel, Journey to Meccania, is a terrible warning of what will happen if Germany wins the War and dominates Europe. It’s the account of visit to Meccania, a Nazi-style totalitarian superstate in 1970 by a Chinese traveller, Mr Ming. Another story, written by Charlotte Haldane, the wife of the scientist J.B.S. Haldane, written in 1932, describes another racist, eugenicist dystopia. This is a state in which the government rigidly controls who may be allowed to marry and breed. The scientist, who has founded this totalitarian society, has also created a poison designed to only kill Blacks. At the moment, this is the only such toxin of its kind, though the story states that there are others working on a similar poison to destroy east Asians. In the ’60s or ’70s the South African secret service, BOSS, was really working on a racist poison like it. The book also uses the term ‘holocaust’, though not in connection with the Jews. Charlotte Haldane was Jewish. Her maiden name was Franken, and so I wonder if she was just looking at the direction the contemporary craze for eugenics and racial ‘science’ was going and showing just how horrific this would be in reality. And it did become horrific reality in Nazi Germany.
Back to H.G. Wells, the book obviously discusses The Time Machine, possibly the first serious book about time travel. Wells based the future races in the book, the Eloi and the Morlocks, on what would happen if present social trend continued. The Eloi are the descendants of the aristocracy and the artists, living above ground but farmed like cattle by the Morlocks, the descendants of the working class, who have been forced underground to tend the machines. Wells set that part of the story 800,000 years in the future because that was when he predicted, using then current theories of speciation, that the two post-human species would have diverged. Apparently the book originally included a section on racial degeneration, which was later cut from the book and published as The Gray Man.
Years ago, Martin Kottmeyer, one of the contributors to the small press, sceptical UFO magazine, Magonia, ran a series of articles ‘Varicose Brains’ on how the Grays of UFO lore conform to the aliens in much SF literature. These were based on contemporary theories of evolution, which predicted that as humanity advanced the brain would develop and become larger while the body would consequently become smaller. As humanity became more intelligent and intellectual, so it would become less sensual and food become increasingly simpler. The result would be small people with large heads and atrophied digestive systems. This sounds exactly like the Grays. And some UFO theories state that these are the degenerate remnants of an alien race following mutation and racial decline due to nuclear war. But it’s also the name Wells’ gave his future, racially degenerate humans that also fascinates me: the Gray Man. Did Wells invent the Gray as a cultural motif, which then became incorporate into the UFO experience in the late 1960s and ’70s following the abduction of Betty and Barney Hill? Or did he just predict the figure’s appearance based on nothing more than his literary imagination and scientific insight?
And there are other connections between UFO encounters and early SF. One female SF writer in the ’20s and ’30s wrote a story about Martians coming to Earth to take water back to their own world. UFOs have often been seen over water, including instances like the Joe Simonton encounter, where they appear to be siphoning it into their craft. And then there’s the film The Man Who Fell To Earth, directed by Nicholas Roeg and starring David Bowie, in which an alien travels from his desert world to bring back some of Earth’s water. Is it a case of the human imagination taking these images and narratives and turning them into accounts of encounters with aliens during extreme psychological experiences? Or is the phenomenon behind the UFO encounters taking these images and stories and manipulating them? Or is it just coincidence?
Happy Boxing Day everyone! I hope you all had a great Christmas Day yesterday, and are enjoying the seasonal holidays. Or at least, as close as anyone comes to enjoying anything in this Tory-inflicted Winter of Discontent. I’m a big fan of the comics artist Kevin O’Neill, who sadly passed away earlier this year. O’Neill drew a number of favourite strips, including ‘Robusters’ and ‘Nemesis the Warlock’ for 2000 AD, and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen for DC. His speciality was robots and aliens, and he was able to draw the most amazing, grotesque and horrific creatures. This was particularly shown in his art for Nemesis the Warlock, which was set in a far-future dark age where Earth was ruled by the Terminators, a religious order which regarded aliens as demons and was intent on their extermination. But it was also shown in many of his other strips, such as the edition of DC’s Green Lantern Corps which the Comics Code refused to pass. The Comics Code were the industry’s censors, set up in the 1950s to reassure American parents that the comics they approved were good, wholesome fare for American youth. The Code refused to pass that issue of the Corps not for any particular reason of the script, but because O’Neill’s artwork was ‘completely unsuitable for children.’ O’Neill had been cheerily turning out such art for British kids in 2000 AD for years by then with no apparent complaint. Well, there was the lad who supposedly told Dave Gibbons, another giant of British comics, that O’Neill’s art gave him nightmares which he could only dispel by looking at his. I think O’Neill consider his rejection by the censors something of an accolade. It’s certainly presented as such in his conversation with Tharg in a celebratory strip 2000 AD ran for Prog 500.
O’Neill also drew the front and back covers for one of 2000 AD’s Christmas issues. This portrayed Santa Claus and the other Christmas features as horrific, including the Christmas turkey and fireplace hung with stockings as rampaging grotesque monsters. It sort of followed in a long tradition of such comic art. One of the children’s humour comics did a feature on the seven ghostly wonders of Britain, in which famous British landmarks became spooky monsters. One of these was ‘Cheddar George’, in which the Somerset cave system became a twisted face with open, ravenous maw.
So, here for your enjoyment, this festive season are the covers drawn by O’Neill. RIP, big man – may your art continue to fascinate, amuse and inspire kids for generations to come. And to everyone else, please – don’t have nightmares.
And here’s the piece from Prog 500 in which Tharg and O’Neill discuss O’Neill’s moment of glory from the Comics Code.
This for fans of films that are so bad that a kind of fascination and enjoyment creeps into them, like the kind of movies shown and lampooned in the American series Mystery Science Theatre 3000. The audience for this kind of film – so bad that they were, in their way, great – was growing when I was a schoolboy. I think it started as a mass movement with the publication of the Medved Brother’s book The Golden Turkey Awards, in which they reviewed a series of truly awful movies. This was followed up in the UK with interviews in Starburst magazine, where they talked about their fascination with truly dreadful SF B movies, such as the dire works of Ed Wood and other masters of the horrendously bad. These films included Robot Monster, which was made on the lavish budget of $30 a day. The robot monster of the title was a man in gorilla suit wearing a diving helmet. To make it suitably futuristic, they stuck a pair of TV aerials on it. The guy playing the monster got the job because he owned the gorilla suit. And then in 1983 Channel 4 gave us The Worst of Hollywood. Introduced by Michael Medved, this brought to the British viewing public such masterpieces as Plan 9 from Outer Space, another of Wood’s grandiose, cheap epics, They Saved Hitler’s Brain, Eegah!, The Wild Women of Wonga, one of the lesser known Godzilla films and a raunchy space epic in which sex-starved aliens land on Earth in a spaceship shaped like a giant breast. The season ended on Christmas Eve with the 1964 film Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. This was intended as a seasonal children’s favourite and the story seems to involve Martian adults trying to take over the world by producing a counterfeit Santa. But the real Santa manages to unite both Terran and Martian children against the adults and the invasion plan is thwarted. I can’t say I watched much of it when it was on. I’d come back from a party at a school friend’s and so caught just the ending. This was of Santa and the children singing ‘Hooray for Santy Claus’, and is pretty much as dire as it sounds. Medved added in his afterword to the film that its composer then went on to do the music for the Gong Show. So in memory of that glorious Christmas Eve 39 years ago, I’ve decided to inflict the trailer for this classic of terrible cinema and its theme song, both of which are on YouTube.
Here’s the trailer from Rotten Tomatoes Classic Trailers channel.
And here’s ‘Hooray for Santy Claus’ from PoppiCiullo’s channel.
Of the directors of terrible movies, Wood has particularly become a cult figure. Before release of The Room, and the career of German-born director Uwe Boll, he was generally considered Hollywood’s worst director and Plan 9 from Outer Space the worst film of all time. This flick is about evil UFO aliens invading Earth and resurrecting zombies from Earth’s graveyards. It’s extremely low budget and is known for its spectacularly cheap special effects and duff dialogue. The UFOs were paper plates doused in petrol and thrown into the air. One scene, set in the cabin of an aircraft, is very obviously shot in someone’s front room with the house door standing in for the cabin’s. The leaders of the zombies was played by Bela Lugosi, but this master of horror died half-way through filming. His place was taken by Wood’s wife’s homeopathic healer, who was something like a foot taller than Lugosi. It began with a weird, rambling introduction by Creswell, one of the celebrity astrologers of the period, who dispensed this pearl of wisdom: ‘We are all interested in the future because we will spend the rest of our lives there.’ Well, quite. You can’t argue with that. And it also boasted such immortal lines as ‘Dead! Murdered! And someone’s to blame.’ ‘Gee, I guess that’s why you’re a sergeant and I’m only a patrolman.’
In addition to Plan 9, Wood is also celebrated, or notorious, for the movie Glenn/Glenda or I Changed My Sex. Wood was a transvestite as well as decorated war hero. He was awarded a Purple Heart for his heroism in taking an enemy machine gun nest during World War II. He did so while wearing women’s satin underwear. He also liked to dress as cowboy, and would go out to restaurants either in drag or dress in a sequined cowboy costume, giving out photos of himself to the waitresses. Glenn/Glenda was intended as a sensitive portrayal of the plight of male crossdressers in contemporary America. In the hands of any other director, this would have been possible. But Wood’s direction was clunky and the dialogue predictably bad. It also has a bizarre dream sequence in which chairs and other furniture move about on their own. Bela Lugosi is also in it as God, speaking lines like ‘Dance to this. Dance to that. But beware the little green dragon sleeping on your doorstep’.
I first became aware of this piece of Wood’s oeuvre from a programme earlier in the 70s on daytime TV presented by Dennis Norden, which looked back on some of the lesser known and cheesier films of the past. It’s also a favourite of rock meister Alice Cooper. Cooper was interviewed by Muriel Grey on The Tube, the Channel 4 pop programme also in the 1980s. She asked Cooper what his favourite film was. He replied that it was Glenn/Glenda. She naturally asked him why. He replied that when he first saw it, it completely bemused him and he wondered what on Earth he was watching. This brought forth her classic reply, ‘You’re a strange boy, Alice’. Well, yes, and at one point he was outraged parents and responsible adults all over America for his antics on stage.
Wood has become such a cult figure that in the 1990s there was a biopic about him with the slogan ‘Films were his passion. Women were his inspiration. Cashmere sweaters were his weakness’. I’ve never seen it, but it does fascinate me. Just like his, and those of the other terrible directors continue to find new audiences despite, or because, of their lack of talent.
This is one for the petrolheads, Heavy Metal fans and aficionados of Mad Max. It’s another video from the Danny Huynh Creations channel on YouTube and is of another of his animatronic creations singing a rock song. In this instance, it’s a couple of the Aliens singing Metallica’s ‘Fuel’. This is an celebration of pure delights of speed and the internal combustion engine that would’ve delighted the Futurists as well as the presenters of Top Gear as well as bikers, obviously. I’ve said before that Huynh’s robots and vehicles have beaten, grungy look as if they’ve come from a dystopian future like that of the Mad Max movies. This is the case with the car in this video. If you also look carefully, you can also see other details from the Alien and Predator franchises. Mounted on the bonnet is a Predator head, whose faceplate lifts up to reveal the creature’s face. In the car’s passenger seat is a human figure, whose head is wrapped in a facehugger. And apart from Mad Max, it also reminds me a little of that other film about high octane future racing, Death Race 2000. Enjoy!
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