The Remembrance of Spooks Past/From a Paranormal Diary

Literary types will spot that I’ve parodied the titles of two classic works of literature for the title of this essay. It’s another response to CJ’s continuing series of articles exploring the nature of the UFO and ghost phenomena and suggesting ways that certain explanations and aspects of them can be tested experimentally. The two books, whose titles I’ve spoofed are Flaubert’s The Remembrance of Things Past and Strindberg’s From an Occult Diary. This is because CJ in part 6 of this exploration into the paranormal argues that far from being striking and unforgettable, memories of paranormal incidents, no matter how weird, are evanescent and soon forgotten. If they have them, people only remember a very few of them. To test this, and investigate the possibility that people have more paranormal and weird incidents than they remember, he therefore proposes an experiment whereby people keep a diary of all the strange and unusual experiences they have.

This flies in the face of some of the current thinking about the recollection of paranormal incidents. The Magonians, in their sceptical attack on perceived UFO encounters as the products of misperception, folklore and popular culture, and the human brain, have long pointed out that humans are not Vulcans. The human memory is not videotape or digital recorders, where events are perfectly and objectively preserved. Rather, psychologists have instead found that we recreate our memories every time we remember them. Thus, while we believe we have perfectly remembered events, in reality they may change over time. These changes and differences in memories have been the basis for songs and films. One things of the song in which a married couple sing about how they first met, only for their memories to diverge on nearly every point, with the chorus ‘Ah yes, I remember it well’. There’s the film, Last Year at Marienbad, in which a couple similarly remember their trip or meeting at the German resort. And of course, their memories of the trip are also different. Whatever the merits of a cinematic exploration of this subject, the film critic Michael Medved included it in his book on the worst films of all time. Some readers of a certain age will remember that, back in the ’80s, Medved presented the hilarious The Worst of Hollywood on Channel 4, in which he showed and talked about some truly terrible movies. I don’t think that however trying on its audience, Last Year at Marienbad is quite as terrible as The Wild Women of Wonga or Plan 9 From Outer Space. A film closer to CJ’s exploration of memory and the supernatural is Celine and Julie Go Boating, a French film about two young women, who go into a mysterious Parisian house and later come out with no memory of what when on inside. The girls then try to remember what happened inside the house. Again, there are differences in recollection and in telling. It’s probably significant that in French ‘to go boating’ is an idiom for telling a shaggy dog story. The Magonians, and other sceptics have remarked on the changes and gradual elaboration of UFO narratives with each successive retelling. A relatively simple encounter, in which a witness believes he or she has been pursued by a strange light in the sky, can therefore become gradually elaborated until it finally becomes an account of terrifying pursuit and abduction by the little Grey bastards.

This process of confabulation and elaboration can be seen in the changing accounts of the alien encounter by the president of the US and military that led to the modern governmental UFO conspiracy by Bill English. English was one of the people in the ’90s, along with Bob Lazar, who was spreading the story that President Truman or Eisenhower had met a delegation of aliens from Zeta Reticuli shortly after the end of the Second World War at a military base. The president had then signed a treaty with them, allowing them to establish their bases on Earth and abduct human beings for experimentation in return for vital scientific advances like velcro. In his version of this narrative, English stated that he had met the Zetan ambassador, O.H. Krill.

Except he didn’t. O.H. Krill was a trick played on English to test the trustworthiness of his memories by a couple of presenters on an American radio station. They’d had English on several times before, and noticed how his memories of the alien encounter changed following questions they had asked him. If they asked him if such-and-such had happened in the encounter on one show, he’d deny that it had. When they had him on again, however, and asked the same question, he’d reply that it had. So they invented the person of the Zetan ambassador Krill. And lo!, it worked! The first time they asked English whether he’d met ambassador Krill – the O.H. stood for ‘Omniscient Highness’ – English denied it. When he came on again on a later edition of their programme, and was then asked about meeting Krill, he replied that he had. Krill, however, was a complete invention of the pair. And they had made up the ‘O.H.’ part of his name in imitation of O.J. Simpson’s monicker.

CJ notes that there are normal, prosaic memories that people would rather not have. In his case, these are of his mother forgetting his father when she was stricken with Alzheimers, and he has consciously forgotten other, painful memories. I’ve heard of a case in my friends and relatives, where one person was advised not to go to the hospital to see a dead relative by their loved ones as they wanted this person to have only good memories of the deceased when they were alive and healthy. I’ve also got a relative who really has a photographic memory, and would rather he hadn’t. He finds it a real pain, as you cannot forget anything and so his mind is filled with useless junk that keeps him awake at night. And like CJ, I’ve found myself that my memories of people and events have faded over the years, such as of friends I had at school whose names I can’t now remember. But even when I was at school my ability to remember some events was terrible. At the beginning of one autumn term the teacher asked us where we went on our holidays. I couldn’t remember. I’d been somewhere, and enjoyed myself, but I’d completely forgotten where I went.

The malleability and vulnerability of the human memory is a real problem for the police and investigators of anomalous events. And hypnotic regression is no help. It was used in the ’90s by abduction researchers such as Bud Hopkins to recover memories of alien abductions that have been wiped from the percipient’s conscious memories. Or at least that’s the claim. In fact, the FBI experimented with it in the 1950s in the hope they could recover extra details from the memories of crime witnesses. They found instead that it was useless. Worse, the hypnotic subject could unconsciously invent false memories through promptings from the questioner, even though these could be entirely involuntary and unconscious on that person’s part as well. Thus, there was a very strong suspicion among sceptics and opponents of the abduction mythology that the memories of alien abductions were false, having been implanted in the experiencers by the abduction investigator. This was entirely involuntary on the part of the researcher, who was not aware that this was occurring. It was just a response by the suggestible hypnotic subject to their questioning, which follow the standard pattern of the abduction narrative. As a result, these confabulated memories also followed the standard abduction narrative of assault, rape and experimentation by the evil Greys.

But CJ and Becky have found that the reverse may happen in people’s remembrance of the paranormal. Instead of becoming more detailed and elaborate, percipients may play down the paranormal nature of the event or even forget it altogether. This was demonstrated to CJ when he was working on Most Haunted. He and two other workers on the programme were talking when a polt lobbed a Mars bar at one of them. This was very much a memorable incident, even for Most Haunted which garnered a little notoriety in later years for having its presenters regularly possessed by spirits, including one who was nearly every week grabbed and nearly dragged away by the ghoulies. But when CJ talked to the other two a few years later about the incident, he found that they’d completely forgotten about it. This seems to coincide with a general reluctance of paranormal witnesses to stress the supernatural or paranormal nature of their encounter. CJ found a few years ago that rather than stress the paranormal aspect of the encounter, witnesses instead look for prosaic, rational explanations.

Paranormal percipients may, nevertheless, retain memories of their experiences, even if they’ve forgotten them or pushed them to the back of their minds. The SPR found when questioning people about anything paranormal that may have happened to them for the Census of Hallucinations that they’d begin by saying no, nothing had, before going on to mention one or more odd incidents, including some that were very dramatic. This left CJ wondering if people deeply bury their anomalous experiences. He suggests that the trick of remembering something is to tell others about it, and use it frequently. But apart from the very dramatic experience it’s possible that some are too trivial or personal to be told. This is a good point, but I also wonder if another factor causing people to forget their paranormal experiences is that the anomalous nature of the event may cause people to put it to one side while they got with their lives. It was something odd that just happened, that may not have any meaning or consequences for them, and so they push it to the back of their minds.

CJ therefore suggests an experiment to test this theory. He asks people to make a list or draw a diagram of the seemingly anomalous experiences in their lives, and to keep trying to recall even more of them. He asks them what they will discover.

He also suggests a second reason why he has proposed this experiment. Back in 2009 he and Becky did some research asking people about their anomalous experiences. They found that the incidents people remembered had occurred in the very recent past, the last three month or so, and that memories of such events tailed off further back in the past. Becky has stated that paranormal researchers have claimed that paranormal incidents creates ‘flashbulb memories’ of the type that are formed by world shattering events, like everyone knowing where they were on the death of JFK or 9/11. CJ, on the other hand states that not only is there no evidence to support this, but he’s not even sure such ‘flashbulb’ memories exist. CJ cited JFK as the obvious example of a memory that seared itself into minds of everyone at the time, but I have read pieces on the web by people who were very much alive when he was assassinated, but who can’t remember where they were. I don’t know if there are people around, who can’t remember what they were doing during 9/11 or where they were when they heard the news that Princess Diana had been killed in a tunnel in Paris trying to run away from the paparazzi. These were also highly dramatic events which massively shocked the general public. In the case of Princess DI it gave rise to all kinds of conspiracy theories that she and her lover, Dodi Fayed, had been assassinated by British intelligence on the orders of the Duke of Edinburgh, theories that I’ve no doubt have absolutely no truth to them. But it wouldn’t surprise me if people’s memories of these traumatic events have faded away. Back to the spooks, and the imbalance he and Becky found in people’s memories of the anomalous, CJ suggests there are two explanations: either people do forget their supernatural experiences, or else the three months before CJ asked them about their encounters saw a massive rise in supernatural events, a rise that is continuing until Gozer will appear in New York as the Stay Puffed Marshmallow Man to destroy humanity. It seems to him that the former is far more likely. Well yes, but it might be wise to keep the proton packs in the basement charged and ready for use, just in case.

CJ then goes on to his third point. He has also run experiments in which people have been asked to keep daily diaries of bizarre events and anomalous experiences. Some of those they’ve experienced are very strange, but yet don’t provoke much comment. Looking back through their diaries, the subjects are surprised at all the weird stuff they’ve forgotten. This reinforces his first two points. He therefore intends to run the experiment again, and asks people to contact him if they’d like to take part. This seems an excellent way of testing the idea that people do forget their paranormal or anomalous experiences.

As for the reason why people do this, CJ offers as an explanation a famous quote from the Horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft was the inventor of cosmic horror, a type of horror fiction based on the idea that humanity is a small speck in a vast and hostile universe full of malign beings of vast powers that we cannot comprehend. He also stated that the universe was so vast and difficult to understand that science had yet to piece all the evidence together to reveal its true nature. When science is finally able to do this, the revelation will be so terrible that humanity will either go mad, or retreat into the safety of a new dark age.

This is very far from the optimistic, promethean vision of Futurists such as Isaac Arthur, who believe that science will grant humanity the ability to expand out into the cosmos and, like other alien civilisations, build artefacts and structures like Dyson Spheres on the scale of solar systems, and the proper mastery of the resources of space will, if done properly, end scarcity and the economy based on it. But other philosophers and writers have been more pessimistic. Nietzsche, the iconoclastic German philosopher, believed that the universe was fundamentally incomprehensible and that constructs such as time and space were simply inventions of the human mind to impose order on it. We are unable to grasp its true nature, and would go mad if we did. The Outlaw Bookseller, Stephen E. Andrews, recommended as one of the best of recent SF books the novel The Thing Itself, which he described as a mixture of John Carpenter’s The Thing and Kantian philosophy. Kant formulated the idea of the thing-in-itself to describe the real, inward nature of reality and its objects, which was hidden to human observation. In this book, two men at an arctic research station fall out. One is thrown outside, where he sees something that powerfully changes him. And then, of course, there’s Machen’s classic short story, The Great God Pan. This begins with two surgeons operating on a young woman’s brain in the hope that this will enable her to see reality as it truly is. A few years later a strange young woman appears in London, who performs excesses so terrible for the members of the upper classes who witness them, that they lose the will to live. In the end it is revealed that she is the daughter of the first woman and something from beyond our understanding.

‘Pan’ means ‘all’ in Greek, and panic originally meant the terror that seized people from the experience of confronting all of nature or reality. Something similar has been experienced by mountaineers and hill walkers in ‘mountain panic’, a terror that can seize people when confronted with the fearful beauty of the mountains. Andy Roberts described it years ago in a piece in Magonia on the Grey Man of Ben MacDhui, a spectre believed to haunt that Scottish mountain. People who have had odd experiences on this mountain include a man who came to to find that he had speaking Gaelic for the past few hours so something, and people who’ve been seized by a fear that has sent them running for several hours. If humanity tried to correlate and remember all its psychic and paranormal experiences, would the resulting vision be too terrible for us to bear? Are our minds trying to protect us by forgetting these experience? Or lastly, is there something editing our memories in order to conceal itself from us?

The SF writer Brian Aldiss wrote a short story based on a similar idea: that an advanced alien civilisation which appeared to have vanished still existed, but it was better for humanity not to know. In the story a human explorer lands on a world, whose inhabitants have passed away but preserved their memory in the form of animatronic heads that have their features and some of their memories. Going through this archive, he presses the activation button for a man’s head. This comes on, and proceeds to speak to its former wife about the unreasoning jealousy he felt when he ran off with an Asian lover. He presses the button for a woman’s head, and this goes on to tell her side of the story. Contemplating them, he realises that despite telling their tales, they aren’t speaking too each other, but are completely oblivious. And so is humanity of the alien super race that appeared to dominate the universe at one point. They are still around, but invisible. And it would have devastating consequences for humanity if this simple fact was realised, let along contact made between the two races. He therefore has no choice but to keep this knowledge to himself and fly on, as far away from humanity as possible.

Or perhaps this is all being too dramatic, and the simple reason people don’t remember their anomalous experiences is that they already have enough to handle with ordinary life as it is.

For further information, see: https://jerome23.wordpress.com/2024/05/19/ghosts-working-notes-part-6/

Phantasms of the Living and the Dead

After a pause of a few days, CJ has returned to writing down his thoughts on ghosts. These are an ongoing attempt by him to sort out his ideas on the matter. This is not an easy matter, as scholars – scientists, theologians, and philosophers, whether sceptics and believers, have been arguing about what ghosts are, if they exist, down the centuries. CJ in this series of blog posts follows the line of the founders of the Society for Psychic Research that ghosts are a kind of hallucination broadcast telepathically by a mind. It’s the same idea that provided the great 19th century writer L. Sheridan LeFanu with the basis for his short story ‘The House and the Brain’. In this latest post, CJ ponders the vexed question of ‘Phantasms of the Living’ as the SPR put it.

Along with investigating ghosts as the spirits of the dead, the SPR also investigated and compiled records of cases where the apparition was of a living person. These were full, so full, in fact, that Gurney, Podmore and Myer, three of the founders, published a book devoted to them, Phantasms of the Living. This comprised two volumes with a total of 1,400 pages. It is one of the books CJ recommends that serious researchers into ghosts should start before moving on to later works, such as Hilary Evans excellent Seeing Ghosts.

Looking through the surveys done over the past century of the appearance of ghosts and apparitions, it appears that there has been something of a change in the phenomenon. It may surprise the modern reader to known that in the census of hallucinations, of those that were recognised there were rather more of the living than of the departed: 32 per cent of the total number of recorded cases compared to 14.3 per cent. In 1948 Mass Observation carried out a survey for Donald West. Of the cases they recorded, only 9 per cent were of the dead while 40.5 per cent of the living. Both of these surveys also recorded cases were the apparition wasn’t recognised: 41 per cent in the census of hallucinations and 31.5 per cent in the Mass Observation’s survey. Mass Observation were a peculiar outfit. They were a group of anthropologists who lamented that ethnographically we knew more about other societies, the primal cultures over which the empire ruled, than we did ourselves and so set about the anthropological study of the British themselves. How they didn’t get arrested with some of their antics I honestly don’t know. This included studying how long it took men to urinate in lavatories to how long it took women to undress for the night. Most of their studies were much more ordinary and socially acceptable than those two examples, and I do wonder if the men making these studies ended up being beaten up or in court trying to explain to a judge that their suspicious activities weren’t voyeurism but serious science.

Back to the spooks. Over the next few years this situation was reversed. Of those ghosts the percipients recognised, the majority were of the dead. The postal survey carried out by the Institute of Paraphysical Research in 1968 and 1974found that of the 28 per cent of cases where the apparition was recognised, two-thirds were of the dead. Another postal survey carried out in 1974 by Erlendur Haraldsson found that only 11 per cent were phantasms of the living, and 31 per cent of the dead. He also cites the findings of ASSAP treasurer Becky Smith, whose survey found that 25 per cent of recognised apparitions were of the living. However, only 16 of the cases in her survey were of people recognised by the percipient. From the available information it appears that there was a change in the phenomenon between 1948 and 1968, but this may be illusory. We naturally don’t know how many of the apparitions in the unrecognised cases were of the living and dead. It’s possible that the real figures may be different, but this is impossible to know because the percipients didn’t recognise the people whose shades they saw.

One of the explanations the SPR put forward for the appearance of ghosts of the living was that they were crisis apparitions. These are broadcast telepathically by people undergoing an emergency or crisis, including their own deaths, to their loved ones. CJ notes that this feels like a natural explanation due to the fact that we are used to ghosts as distressed or seeking help. He could have added here that this type of apparition seems related to the doppelganger or fetch of traditional fairy lore. The term ‘doppelganger’ is German for ‘double goer’ or perhaps ‘double walker’. They were supernatural doubles of individuals, and it was considered an omen of that person’s death if one was seen. One of the explanations advanced in the 16th or 17th century for them was that the bodies of seriously ill or dying people exuded vapours, which coalesced into a replica of the original. After this person’s death, the fetch then went to join the fairies in their hills.

Becky’s suggested solution to this apparent change in the phenomenon is that the publicity surrounding the publication of Phantasms of the Living or the SPR’s hypothesis that ghosts were created telepathically made it more likely that people would report instances where the apparition was of someone still alive. The fact that Sheridan LeFanu uses the idea in his ghost story shows that it had permeated some way into popular ideas about spooks, at least among that section of the public that read ghost stories.

Another possibility CJ considers is that these are cases of mistaken identity. He cites an instance where he himself was struck by the astonishing similarity of a young woman drinking a milkshake in an ice cream parlour on Cheltenham High Street and that of a young female friends who had sadly passed away from lung cancer. It’s quite possible that some cases of doppelgangers and apparitions of the living are indeed due to mistaken identity. There is a limit to the number of different faces human biology can create, and so, in the words of the popular saying, ‘everyone has a double’. Well, possibly not everyone, but a few. There are cases of people who are physically identical but who are completely unrelated. I was once mistaken for someone who worked for the Ministry of Agriculture’s laboratory outside Bristol.

CJ ends his piece by wondering how many of us can visualise ourselves, and that it’s probably easier for someone to project an image of somebody else than of themselves. He therefore believes that if the ghost of a murdered girl is seen, it probably comes from the minds of other people, such as the murderer or the girl’s relatives and loved ones, rather than the girl herself. Could it come from folklorists thinking of the tale? And so could we build a ghost?

This takes us into the realm of the ‘Philip’ experiment, in which a group of psychical researchers constructed an entirely fictional entity, ‘Philip’, with whom they tried to make contact during seances. They succeeded, which seems to suggest that it’s possible for living experimenters to create entirely fictional communicating spirits, spirits that have never lived and which don’t exist outside of the imaginations of the researchers.

Related to this is an apparition that haunts the house of one of the American pulp writers. I’ve forgotten the details, but the pulp writer wrote a series of stories of a tough crime fighter. Visitors to his house since his decease have seen a dark, shadowy figure haunting it. One of the British Marvel magazines, in which this story appeared, posed the question of whether the writer’s intense concentration had resulted in the psychic creation of this apparition. I can’t remember who the writer was, but one of the writers on that magazine was Alan Moore, a titan of British and American comics as well as a ritual magician. This was about forty years ago, but it may be that whoever wrote the article based his supposition on the experiences of Moore and others.

Now, I respectfully differ from CJ in that I don’t think there is a single, one-size-fits-all solution to the question of what ghosts are. The telepathic hypothesis may explain some ghosts and apparitions, but not all. It certainly offers a solution to the old sceptical question that if ghosts are the souls of the dead, why don’t they appear naked? A few naked ghosts were reported in 17th century Quebec, but apart from that the vast majority of spooks appear clothed. I also agree with CJ in that we don’t really know offhand what we look like, although obviously we have no trouble recognising ourselves in mirrors. I dimly remember reading back in the ’90s in one of the papers that scientists had discovered that subconsciously people think of their appearance as it was when they were in their 20s. In the Welsh medieval classic, the Mabinogion, the inhabitants of Annwn, the land of the dead, all look like young people of 30 with the exception that their hair is white. And according to some Spiritualists, at least from what I’ve read, on the after death plane we age backwards, becoming young and vital once again. Despite this, most ghost reports seem to be of the person as they were in life and seem to show that age, no matter how young or old they were.

There have been a number of attempts to solve the problem of ghosts and their appearance. Terry Pratchett in Mort explained it with Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphogenetic fields. Mort is Pratchett’s third book following the Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic. In it, a young lad gets recruited by Death to take over the Grim Reaper’s job. One of the souls he collects is that of a witch. At the woman’s death, the morphogenetic fields maintaining her appearance collapse, and she goes from aged crone to beautiful young woman before finally become a floating light ready for her next incarnation. The idea that our post mortem appearance could be due morphogenetic fields is interesting, though somewhat different from the theory as it was propounded by Sheldrake. I doubt Pratchett was serious about it though. My impression is that he was a Humanist, although when he was suffering from the Alzheimer’s that took him from us, he said that he could feel the presence of his father reassuring him that everything was all right. He was serious about his own writing, and clearly loved Fantasy literature, but he was also much less than respectful towards it. He couldn’t tell whether he was writing it or satirising it. At a talk he gave at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature back in the ’90s he described himself as ‘a giant hairy maggot crawling over its [Fantasy’s] corpse’. He certainly didn’t seem to believe in magic, which he found far less interesting that science, which had produced wonderful things like street lights. And it all came from the brains of monkeys, as he said in a Beeb programme on him. It seems to me that when he cited morphogenetic fields, it was as a literary device rather than a serious proposition.

Another suggested solution, proposed by the German physicist Gerd Wassermann, was an alternative form of matter, shadow matter. This could explain the ghost phenomenon, though as it stands it’s purely theoretical and so the Magonians concluded that it was another case of trying to explain one unknown with another. Nevertheless, this week there was an article in one of the journals suggesting that along with the objects of the normal matter in the universe there was an invisible, dark matter mirror universe. If ghosts are composed of exotic matter, could this dark matter universe somehow be their origin and domain. If so, what would be the physics in which this normally invisible substance becomes visible during a haunting?

I’ve also wondered before now our consciousness, our sense of self, also includes our appearance and our clothes. We do have a sense of our own bodies. For example, if we lift an arm up, we’re aware that we have done so, and although we may not always consciously be aware of it, I wonder if at some level we’re also aware of our clothes. It could be that it is this awareness of our bodies and our clothing that results in ghosts being visible and clothed in hauntings.

Another idea is that ghosts may be the product of Platonic Ideal Forms. Plato believed that apart from raw matter objects were shaped by transcendent ideal forms, somewhat like the idea a sculptor has when carving stone. Apart from the general ideal forms, there are transcendent forms of individuals as they are at any given time. Their matter may decease and decay, but their ideal form continues and is intelligible and perceptible to those with psychic gifts.

Returning to CJ’s suggestion that ghosts may be impressions of a person’s appearance as seen by another, it may be able to test this. If this is true, must an observer be in the same position as the person, whose observation generated the spook, in order to see it? Would a person in a different position not see the ghost at all, or would they see the ghost from the same perspective as the first person? For example, suppose a ghost appears in a room directly facing the entrance door. Would someone also have to be in this position to see it? Suppose there was a second person occupying a position sideways to the ghost. Would they also see the ghost facing them straight on, as the person who made the original observation saw it, and which the observer at the entrance door sees it? Or would it see it sideways, or not at all. If they see it sideways, then either there was another person there, whose telepathic impressions are still generating the ghost, or the ghost isn’t a telepathic impression from an observer.

This experiment reminds me of my experience viewing an exhibition of holograms at the Ideal Home Exhibition in Bristol in the summer of 1980. Holograms in this sense were three dimensional photographs made by lasers on glass. It was a strange experience, as when you moved from one to another the image would suddenly materialise in front of you out of, it seemed, thin air. Would something like that occur to the observer of a ghost that had been created as an image by another observer, long since departed? As he or she adopted the position of the original observer, would the ghost suddenly materialise just as the holograms did when someone moved in front of them?

CJ is raising some serious and definitely thought-provoking ideas in his series of blog posts, ideas which deserve serious consideration.

Ghosts: Working Notes (Part 4).

Was UFO Contactee George Adamski Really a Hoaxer?

This might interest some of the peeps here who are into ufology and the question of whether aliens really are visiting the Earth. I’m a member of ASSAP, the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomenon. It’s an amateur psychical research group, which was set up in the 1980s to investigate spontaneous cases of ghosts poltergeists, UFOs and so on in the field, as opposed to the laboratory work of the Society for Psychical Research. It differs from other psychical research and ghost hunting groups by using scientific protocols in its investigations as well as mediums. It’s membership comprises wide variety of people, from those with backgrounds in science and medicine, professional investigators like the police, and ordinary people fascinated with and keen to explore these bizarre phenomena for themselves. It has two magazines, Seriously Strange, which is the more popular of the two and similar in tone to the Fortean Times, and Anomaly: the Journal of Research into the Paranormal, which is rather more academic with articles properly referenced. The most recent edition of Anomaly, for May this year, carries an article by Dr John Tate, ‘George Adamski: The Luxury of Disbelief’ (pp. 172-181). And it’s truly perplexing as it questions whether Adamski was the fraud everyone, or nearly everyone, thinks he was.

Adamski was a Polish-America restauranteur, owning a hot-dog establishment on Mount Palomar. He was the first of the UFO contactees, men and women who believed they’d met aliens, who had given them special knowledge and messages for humanity. They emerged in the 1950s, and many of these messages were naturally warnings from the ufonauts about the threat of nuclear weapons. Adamski was deeply interested in eastern mysticism, and claimed to have met a Venusian out in the Californian desert and observed and photographed his spacecraft. The alien, Orthon, also left a footprint from his boots in the sand, of which Adamski and his fellows took a plaster cast. He seems to have been a dubious figure, at least. There’s a suggestion that he made have been bootlegging and smuggling hooch during Prohibition. He’s supposed to have told his cronies one evening that the end of Prohibition had been bad for him, as he had made money selling wine and telling the authorities it was for religious purposes. Presumably this was as part of the sacrament in Christian holy communion. His photographs have been analysed professionally. One of the alien ships was really his chicken hutch, while there have been claims since that the photograph of the classic UFO he made, which appears on the poster in Mulder’s wall in the X-Files with the slogan ‘I want to believe’, was really the top part of a kerosene or similar lantern. It’s so much taken for granted that Adamski hoaxed his encounter that the late British UFO Magazine, which wasn’t particularly sceptical, titled an article about him ‘The Great Pretender’. There was a little spat a few years ago between the Fortean Times and Colin Bennet, who at that time was the webmaster of a site claiming to be the ‘real Fortean Times‘. Bennet was an enthusiast of Postmodernism and had just then published a book about Adamski, Looking for Orthon. Bennet frequently denounced on his website what he called ‘the cult of the real’ and seems to taken the view of the extreme Greek sceptics and contemporary Postmodern philosophers that there was no objective reality. He had appeared on a panel at the Fortean Times Unconvention that year, where he got annoyed with the Fortean Times crew who tried to get him to say if he really thought Adamski was genuine. Hence there was a lot of ranting and personal attacks on his blog against Lance Sieveking and the rest of the Gang of Fort.

I’d always assumed that Adamski was making it all up, though one of the great commenters on this blog has strongly argued that he was instead the victim of a hoax by the US military or intelligence services. I don’t know about that, but Adamski certainly was suspected by them of being a Communist. In the above article, Dr Tate suggests that there are good reasons for thinking Adamski may have been genuine. Firstly, unlike the popular myth, he didn’t own a hamburger stall on Palomar. It was actually quite large, and more like a restaurant. His account of his journey into space aboard the Venusian craft contains details that were only confirmed later during the manned spaceflight missions of later decades. He mentioned ‘fairylights’ surrounding the Venusian UFO, which was unknown at the time but later observed by astronauts. He also said that in space he saw no stars, which again is what the astronauts observed, contrary to expectations. Other experts have analysed his UFO photograph, to reveal details showing it definitely wasn’t part of a lantern and appears to have been a real object.

Furthermore, Adamski wasn’t alone when he met Orthon. He was accompanied by six other people, who also observed the Venusian and his craft. One of these other witnesses was George Hunt Williamson, a professional anthropologist, who carried out pioneering work excavating the remains of the pre-Columbian Amerindian civilisations in South America. Williamson was also into spiritualism and became an advocate of the ancient astronaut theory that claims humanity was visited in the past by aliens. These were responsible for the creation of the world’s ancient monuments like Stonehenge, the pyramids, Easter Island and so on. Later on Williamson changed his name to d’Obrenovic. I think he may also have become involved in far right politics. But at the time of the Adamski sighting he was a respected academic.

Tate says he has no idea what was going on, which I think is a fair description of ufology full stop. Some UFO sightings are hoaxes, misidentifications of ordinary objects seen under extraordinary conditions, hallucinations or confabulations produced by unusual psychological states, sightings of top secret military aircraft. Others, to me, seem genuinely paranormal in the sense they are more like a ghost sighting or similar supernatural event than nuts and bolts alien spacecraft. But who knows? Maybe a few UFOs have been of visiting spacecraft, or beings from the future or parallel worlds. And may be there isn’t a single explanation at all for the UFO phenomenon.

Tate’s article raises some interesting questions about Adamski, and certainly made me wonder if there was a kernel of truth in what he said. If anyone’s interested, I’ll post a longer piece about the article and some of the points it makes.

Saturn as the Abode of the Dead in Victorian Science Fiction

I put up a post the other day about an early 20th century SF story from 1901, in which Jesus Christ is raised on Mars and sent to Earth by the Martians to enlighten us. They rescue Him from the crucifixion, and bring Him back to Mars. It struck me that the story may have been an influence or at least prefigured the idea that later arose among UFO contactees and researcher that Christ was an alien. The best-known of the various UFO religions that believe this is the Aetherius Society, founded in the 1950s by former taxi driver George King. King was into eastern mysticism, and became aware of his mission as spokesman for the Space Brothers when he heard a voice in his kitchen one day telling him to prepare to be the voice of interplanetary parliament. The Aetherius Society believes that King was the recipient of spiritual messages from Aetherius, an alien on Venus, and that Jesus is also there on the planet. Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Israel, also claimed that he’d been taken aboard a UFO and shown how Jesus and his predecessor as head of the religion, W.D. Fard, were also on Venus. Both Christ and Fard were Black, and Fard was directing and preparing for the coming apocalyptic war against the Whites that would free Black America.

Looking through the SF collection Born of the Sun again today, I found another early SF story with a religious or supernatural dimension. This was John Jacob Astor’s 1894 A Journey in Other Worlds, in which Saturn is inhabited by the spirits of the dead. I think this was influenced by contemporary spiritualism and trends in psychic research. The followers of the 18th century Swedish scientist and mystic, Immanuel Swedenborg, believed that he had travelled in spirit across the Solar System and that the various planets were inhabited, including by the spirits of the departed. This was also the same time, I think, that mediums like Helene Smith believed that they were receiving telepathic messages from Mars. The Surrealists were fascinated by these mediumistic accounts, and one collection of Surrealist writings contains a drawing, done automatically, of Mozart’s house on either Jupiter or Saturn. There’s definitely a religious element in much Spiritualist speculation about space and early Science Fiction, and I’m very sure that this has had an influence on the UFO phenomenon and its accounts of contacts with spiritually advanced, benevolent alien beings.

Uri Geller Loses His Temper with the Spoon Council

This is hilarious, and nothing to do with politics. I gather that Uri Geller has raised his head again, threatening to use his psychic powers against Vladimir Putin. Or at least his spoons. I found this video from 2012 on YouTube in which the great psychic loses his temper during an interview with a man from the Spoon Council. Geller wants to talk about his great achievements, while his interviewer keeps reminding him that he became successful in Britain through appearing on TV and bending people’s spoons. Geller gets very irate at this, and throws him out, threatening to call his lawyer. But there’s a shot of his car outside, decorated with bent spoons.

Geller’s amusing, but I seriously doubt that he has any genuine psychic powers. The spoon bending trick, for example, goes back to the 18th century where it can be found in the book Rational Recreations. Which sounds like the kind of book Mr Spock would read for fun. And back in the ’70s, an Israeli judge found against him in a court case brought by a dissatisfied customer at one of his cabaret performances. Geller was at the time Israel’s foremost nightclub stage magician. He advertised his performances as showing undeniable proof of the existence of psychic powers. But an engineering student who went to one said that all he saw was stage magic, and sued. I think it was under the Israeli version of the trades descriptions act. The beak was not impressed with Geller either, and found in the student’s favour.

At his height in the ’70s Geller was working with scientific psychic researchers like Andrija Puharich. He once claimed to have teleported from Israel to the US, although someone punctured this by producing his airplane ticket. He appeared on one American TV show with one of the American astronauts, who had played golf on the Moon. Geller produced the golf ball he claimed the astronaut had hit and lost up there. And back in the ’90s the Mexican government paid him to use his psychic powers to find lost Aztec gold. He looked for it by flying about over the land of the ancient Mexica in a helicopter waving his hand out the window in the hope of getting the vibrations or whatever. Nice work if you can get it!

Back to the spoons, one of Private Eye’s spoof columns for a long time was ‘Me and My Spoon’, in which the magazine spoofed interviews with celebs and politicians with fictional interviews asking them what their opinions on spoons were. These satirical pieces usually ended with the celeb throwing a strop. Geller’s interview here seems straight out of it.

Mark Felton Demolishes the Claims for Die Glocke, Hitler’s Anti-Gravity Time/Space Machine

Yesterday I posted up a piece by the military historian, Dr Mark Felton, considering the evidence for Nazi flying discs. Felton’s an expert on World War II and the military technology of that time. He came to the conclusion that if the Nazis were experimenting with flying discs, then they were almost certainly failures given the spectacular failures of later, post-War experimental disc-shaped aircraft like the Avrocar. In this video he casts a similarly bleak, withering gaze over claims that the Nazis were working on a secret antigravity craft, called Die Glocke, or ‘the Bell’ because of its resemblance to the musical instrument installed in church towers. Not only is it claimed that the Glocke used antigravity, but it was also apparently a time/space machine. I thought immediately of Dr Who’s TARDIS. Did the Nazis really possess such a device, or have the people who are pushing this watched too many episodes of Dr Who, Time Tunnel and so on?

Felton begins in his usual dry manner. ‘Did’, he asks, ‘the Nazis possess antigravity? Could they flip between dimensions? And did Adolf Hitler escape to the Moon using such a craft? No, I haven’t been self-medicating,’, he says, and goes on to explain he’s only considering the claims made in ‘certain documentaries’. He wants to know if they contain any truth or are just ‘bovine excrement’. I think after watching this the answer lies far more on the side of bovine excrement, but I’ve never been persuaded by the Nazi saucer myth. But Felton states that the Americans and their Allies were astounded by how advanced German aerospace engineering was. The Nazi regime produced a number of highly advanced air- and spacecraft, like the Messerschmitt 262 jet plane, the Bachem Natter rocket interceptor, the V1 Flying Bomb, the V2 rocket. It was a secretive regime, operating from underground bases using slave labour, and so it was ideal for distortion of historical truth. Much of that distorted history was created by the Nazis themselves, and by their successors since then.

The video states that the Glocke entered public consciousness in a book published in 2000. This, followed by others, claimed that the project was under the control of Hans Kammler, the head of the V2 project. Kammler was the stereotypical Nazi leader, straight out of a comic book. He disappeared at the end of the War and was never seen again. It was supposedly powered by a highly volatile substance, red mercury. But Felton eschews discussing how it worked because it’s all theoretical. He just gives a physical description of the putative machine, stating it was 12-14 feet tall, shaped like a Bell, and had a swastika on its side, just so’s people knew where it came from. Is there any documentary evidence for this? No. The only evidence comes from an interview between an author and a Polish intelligence officer, who claimed access to a dossier produced by the SS personnel working on the project. Various names have been suggested for the scientists and officers in charge. One of them is Werner Heisenberg, due to a close similarity between his name and one of the scientists supposedly involved. Heisenberg was the German physicist in charge of the Nazis’ atomic programme. He produced a nuclear reactor, which partially worked, and an atomic bomb which didn’t. Mercifully. But everything is known about what he did during the War, and he was captured and thoroughly interrogated by the Americans afterwards. He didn’t mention the Glocke. Which in my view means that he very definitely wasn’t involved.

The video goes back further, stating that claims of the Glocke actually go back even further, to 1960 and the publication of the French author’s Bergier and Pauwels’ Le Matin des Magiciens, translated into English in 1963 as The Morning of the Magicians. This made a series of claims about the Nazis, including UFOs and occultism, that were roughly based on fact. The Horten brothers had designed flying wing aircraft, which resemble UFOs. After the War their plane ended up in America. Felton says that it clearly influenced later American planes, like the Stealth aircraft. He suggests the Horten flying wing plane contributed to the flying saucer craze of the late 1940s. It has been suggested that what Kenneth Arnold saw in his 1947 flight over the Rockies, which produced the term ‘flying saucer’, was in fact the Hortens flying wings being secretly flown. As for Nazi occultism, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, was an occultist. He intended Wewelsburg castle to be a pseudo-pagan temple, but claims of Nazi involvement in the occult have been greatly exaggerated. Indeed they have. Nicholas Goodricke-Clarke, in his book on Nazi paganism, states that Hitler drew on the bizarre evolutionary ideas of the neo-Pagan cults in Germany and Vienna, like the Ariosophists, whose ideas really were bizarre and quite barking. He also had some contact with the Thule society. However, the pagan sects were banned during the Third Reich because Adolf was afraid they’d divide Germans. He concludes that real Nazi paganism was slight, except in the case of Himmler and the SS, who really did believe in it and wanted his vile organisation to be a new pagan order. Pauwels and Bergier’s book fed into the nascent 60s counterculture and then into the later New Age. Their book is notorious, and has certainly been credited as a source for much New Age speculation and pseudo-history by magazines like the Fortean Times. I think there was a split between the two authors. Bergier was an anti-Nazi, who had spent time in a concentration camp. I think he may even have been Jewish. Pauwels, on the other hand, gravitated towards the far right.

Villainous Nazi super-scientists also became part of SF pulp fiction of the 1960s and 70s. The Nazis were supposed to have discovered the secrets of space and even time travel. One of the books flashed up in this part of the video is Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream. This came out in the 1980s, and pondered what would have happened if Hitler had emigrated to America and become a pulp SF writer. The West German authorities weren’t impressed, and it was banned in Germany under the Basic Law outlawing the glorification of the Nazis. I found it in a secondhand bookshop in Cheltenham. It proudly boasted that it contained the SF/Fantasy novel Hitler would have written. Well, Hitler didn’t go to America, and never wrote any SF or Fantasy novels, and the book actually looked really dull. So I saved my money and didn’t buy it. This type of literature flourished because the Americans had been so impressed by genuine German scientific achievements. And the post-War atomic age and UFO craze allowed imaginations to run riot. So Nazi scientists also turned up as the villains in various SF film and TV shows. One prize example of that is the X-Files, in which the secret programme to breed human-alien hybrids at the heart of the UFO mystery is done by Nazi biologists, who came to America under Operation Paperclip.

The video then asks whether the Nazis really did experiment with antigravity. Well, they experimented with everything else, including occultism. NASA was also experimenting with antigravity from the 1990s onwards, as were the Russians and major aerospace corporations like Boeing in the US and BAe Systems in Britain. The Russians even published a scientific paper on it. But despite their deep pockets, these were all failures. And it seems that Operation Paperclip, which successfully collected German rocket scientists, chemical and biological weapons experts, and aerospace engineers, somehow failed to get their antigravity experts. We don’t have the names of any of the scientists and engineers, where they worked or even any credible documents about them. If the Glocke really had been built and its scientists captured by the US and USSR, why were the Americans and Russians trying to build it all from scratch. And if Hitler did have antigravity and UFOs, then how the hell did he lose the War?

Some sources claim that the project was also run by SS Gruppenfuhrers Emil Mazuw and Jakob Sporrenberg, both deeply noxious individuals. Mazuw was the governor of Pomerania, one of the former German territories later given to Poland after the War along with Silesia. He was the head of the SS and high police in Pomerania, and was deeply involved in the Holocaust. Before the War he was a factory worker. What use would he have been to a secret scientific project at the cutting edge of physics? Ditto Sporrenberg. He was also deeply involved in the Shoah, and had zero scientific or engineering background.

The video then considers the 1965 Kecksburg UFO crash, which is also cited as the evidence for the Glocke’s existence. That year a bright fireball was seen in the sky over six US states and Ontario in Canada, coming down in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania. The US army was mobilised, cordoning the area off and taking something away. In 2005 NASA revealed that the object was a capture Russian satellite, the Cosmos 96, which had re-entered the atmosphere and broken up. But this has provided much material for certain TV documentaries from the 90s to the present.

Felton concludes that if the Glocke ever existed, it was probably part of the German nuclear programme, and not a time machine. That’s if it ever existed at all. Echoing the X-Files‘ Fox Mulder, he finishes with ‘The truth is out there, as they say’.

Well, yes, the truth is out there. But as Scully was also fond of reminding Mulder, so are lies. And the Glocke is almost certainly one of these. The UFO world is riddled with fantasists and liars, some of whom are government agents apparently on a mission to spread misinformation. I think this is to destabilise the UFO milieu and stop them getting too close to real secret military aircraft. There’s the case of a civilian contractor working near one of the US secret bases, who became convinced that it really did contain a captured alien, with whom he was communicating over the internet. It seems he was being deliberately led up the garden path and pushed into madness by two air intelligence operatives, who first fed him information apparently supporting his views, and then told him it was all rubbish. It’s a technique known in the intelligence world as ‘the double-bubble’. They lead the target first one way, pretending to be whistleblowers, and then tell them it’s all lies, leaving them confused and not knowing what to believe.

Some UFO sightings are almost certainly of secret spy aircraft, including balloons. The Russians also encouraged belief in UFOs as a spurious explanation for secret space launches from Kapustin Yar, their main rocket complex. I also think that some of the stories about crashed UFOs, secret Nazi research were disinformation spread by the superpowers to put the others off the scent. The extraterrestrial hypothesis was only one explanation for UFOs after the War. It’s been suggested that when Major Quintillana said that the US had captured a flying disc at Roswell, he was deliberately trying to mislead the Russians and hide what had really come down, which was a Project Mogul spy balloon. Friends of mine are convinced that the Russians were similarly running a disinformation campaign about Soviet official psychical research in the 1970s. A number of western journos were given tours of secret Russian bases where experiments were being conducted into telepathy, telekinesis and so on. Some of the more excitable American generals were talking about a ‘psychic cold War’. One of the most bonkers stories I’ve heard was that the Russians were supposed to have developed hyperspace nuclear missiles. Instead of passing through normal space, these rockets were to be teleported to their destinations by trained psychics, rather like the mutated navigators folding space in the David Lynch film of Frank Herbert’s Dune. The hacks who followed up these stories found the secret bases were actually bog-standard factories. Workers told them that their places of work had been briefly taken over by the government, new rooms constructed, and a lot of strange equipment put in which was subsequently taken out. It looks very much like the Russian government believed it psychic research was all nonsense – hardly surprising for an officially atheist regime committed to philosophical materialism. The whole point of the exercise was to convince the Americans it worked, so they’d waste their money going down a technological and military blind alley. It wouldn’t surprise me if the Polish intelligence agent at the heart of this claim had been engaged on a similar project. Or perhaps he was just lying on his own time.

As for fantasists and yarn-spinners, well, I believe the Montauk project is one prize example. This was the subject of a series of books published in the 90s by two Americans. They claimed there had also been a secret time travel project based on, you guessed it, Nazi research. I think it also involved evil aliens and whatever else was going round the UFO world at the time. Kevin McClure and the Magonians were highly suspicious of it, not just because it was bullsh*t, but because it also seemed to glorify the Third Reich. They suspected the authors of writing far-right propaganda.

The Montauk project also appears to be partly based on the Philadelphia Experiment. This was the claim that during the War the Americans had conducted an experiment to render warships invisible to radar using magnetism, following Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. This had gone seriously wrong. The crew of the ship under test suffered terrible effects. Some burst into flame, another walked straight through a bulkhead before the ship itself vanished. The story was later turned into a time travel movie of the same name in the 1980s.

Was it true? Naaah. Although I’ve seen it in various UFO books, the claims seem to come down to one man. I’ve forgotten his name, but someone who knew him wrote in about him to the Fortean Times. The man had been his uncle, an alcoholic and spinner of tall tales, who had precious little, if anything, to do with science or the military.

It looks to me very much like the Glocke antigravity time/space machine is yet another of this myths or pieces of disinformation. I don’t think it was ever built, and the Polish intelligence officer who claimed it was, was a liar. As for the authors of the subsequent books and articles claiming its all true, no doubt many of them are sincerely genuine. But it doesn’t mean they’re right.

And some of the people pushing the Nazi saucer myths are real Nazis, seeking glorify the regime through sensational claims of secret technology and bases in the Canadian far north, Antarctica and the Moon. They do it to enthral people with the glamour of Nazi technology to divert attention away from the real horrors it perpetrated.

I’m sure most of the people, who believe in Nazi UFOs are decent people, who are genuinely appalled at the atrocities committed by Hitler and his minions. But there are Nazis out there trying to manipulate people, and that’s the danger.

Nazism and Fascism need to be fought and any claims of Nazi superscience or occult power critically examined, even if it seems to be harmless nonsense.