The Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe: Fortean and Paperback Writer

I can hear the Beetles’ song, ‘Paperback Writer’, going through my head as I type. One of the books I’ve been enjoying this week is Rian Hughes’ Rayguns and Rocketships: Vintage Science Fiction Book Cover Art. This reproduces the art on SF book covers from editions of Jules Verne in the 19th century, through the boy’s magazines of the 1920s and 1930s and on the paperbacks of the period up to the end of the 60s. The paperback writers were poorly paid, and tied to contracts that bound them to grind out their epics very quickly. There’s even a story about one poor soul who was more or less kept in a dungeon. He was in a small room at the end of the corridor, sleeping on a mattress covered with coats and other bits of clothing. And one of these paperback hacks was Robert Lionel Fanthorpe. Yes, I checked. This is the Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe, Church of Wales Minister, RE lecturer and the former presenter of Fortean TV in the ’90s. That Lionel Fanthorpe.

As for the quality of the good reverend’s writing, Hughes gives some grudging praise, writing

‘Some of Badger’s [Fanthorpe’s publisher] literary output is not as quite godawful as you might imagine. Though unapologetically produced at speed and without pretension, Fanthorpe often draws on literary or historical themes or digresses into page-padding philosophical discussions, and I get the impression that the Reverend could actually write well, should he choose to – which, for the most part, he didn’t. The first Badger I came across, in a local jumble sale, was Rodent Mutation. Giant beavers threaten London, so our heroes seek out the help of a certain Professor Septimus Harbottle, an expert in beaver lore. I can picture the author walking across his study , hefting the relevant volume of Encyclopedia Britannica, then proceeding to read from it verbatim, interspersing the occasional “the professor explained” or “‘I see,’ the investigator nodded” as required. This goes on for an entire chapter.’

The paperback companies had a simple formula for inspiring their writers. They’d decided on a title, commission the cover art, and then get the writers to write the story around it. Many of the paintings used on the covers were reused from other novels, sometimes from Italian and Spanish publishers, and Hughes’ provides pages of examples.

Here’s a few of the paintings that graced some of Fanthorpe’s works. You can tell he was already interested in Fortean subjects with the cover featuring a classic flying saucer.

This last looks like it was written to exploit the craze for giant ant and insect stories that appeared in SF B movies of the ’50s and ’60s.

Interestingly, one of the Fanthorpe’s novels, whose cover is collected in this book, is The Synthetic Ones. Presumably this is artificial people produced biochemically, rather than mechanical androids and robots. If that’s the case, then it prefigures the replicants of Blade Runner, who seem to be genetically engineered and artificially produced humans than straightforward machines.

Another of his is about the threat caused by bacteria that could communicate. This idea is along the same line’s as Greg Bear’s Blood Music, in which a scientist creates nano calculating machines from his own blood cells. Injecting himself with them, they develop sentience and begin changing and improving him, before breaking through the skin barrier to infect everyone else in the world, changing global human civilisation as a result. The idea of nanotechnology was decades away when Fanthorpe was writing, but the idea of intelligent bacteria is close, just as it is to stories about ‘grey goo’, when nano weapons have got loose, infecting and destroying, or at least radically changing, the organisms around them.

As for the books’ art, they vary in quality. Some are excellent, others less so. I prefer figurative art, and am not a fan of the abstract covers that came in with the sixties nor the photographic covers which were also used. Obviously the stories have dated, with the exception of the classics, but I think there’s material here to inspire future writers and artists.

Video Showing How the Hutchison Antigravity Effect Was Faked

The Hutchison effect is supposedly antigravity and other weird phenomena generated by a variety of electronic equipment. There are a number of videos about it on YouTube claiming that it may provide free, Zero-Point energy and that it has somehow been covered by the scientific and political establishment. I came across it in the 1990s when Hutchison and his experiments were just coming on to the scene. Hutchison – I’m afraid I’ve forgotten his first name – had collected a mish-mash of electronic equipment and the weird phenomena started when he set it all working. At that point he seemed not to be claiming to know how it worked, or which piece of the equipment, if any, was responsible for it. I think the parts as a whole totalled about £250,000 in cost, and so was extremely expensive to try to replicate. He made videos about the weird phenomena he claimed it produced which circulated about the paranormal/fringe science community. One of the Magonians went to one showing of one of these films, and weren’t impressed. There was footage of yoghurt purportedly rising up into the air. They said it looked like it had been poured out of the pots and then the film placed upside down so it appeared to flow upwards. It did, however, convinced Albert Budden, who wrote a book suggesting that the ‘Hutchison effect’ as it was being called, was the principle behind UFO flight. Then it seems the interest in Hutchison and his machines appeared to die away. I was surprised to find that it was still going.

I found this video on Robert Murray-Smith’s channel on YouTube. Smith shows how Hutchison faked the footage of a plastic balls placed between two Tesla coils appeared to be levitated into the air. You won’t be surprised to hear that it had nothing to do with electronic standing waves, and everything to do with concealed strings. Smith appends his video with an apology, stating that he doesn’t want to upset anyone nor cause people who believe in alternative physics and for whom he has nothing but respect, to question their beliefs. He just wants to point out that there are a lot of charlatans out trying to fool people.

1949 Newsreel Footage of Police Examining Crashed Saucer in Maryland

This is another video covering flying saucers. It’s a very short piece from a Pathe newsreel showing American police examining the ragged remains of what is described as a ‘flying saucer’ in Maryland. The piece says that it was found while they were looking for a missing Dr Caldwell, and may be a solution to the flying saucer mystery. This was some of other, competing explanations for flying saucers were as popular as the idea that they were alien spacecraft. Many people suspected they were Nazi or Russian secret weapons. The suggestion here is that the saucer, and the rest of those sighted, may have been the creations of the missing scientist. I find this fascinating, as I haven’t heard of this incident before. It raises several questions. One of these is whether the remains found were those of a genuine saucer-shaped aircraft and, obviously, whether there was any connection to the missing scientist. Could it also have been a fake by the authorities, designed to put the public at ease and off the scent? On the other hand, it also has official aircraft markings on its tail and the Americans were experimenting with saucer-shaped aircraft at the time, so it could easily have been one of these. It would be very interesting to find out more.

Video of Flying Saucer-Shaped Drone

I’ve also been looking through a few videos about flying saucers and unusual aircraft. One of these was this video posted by Mashable on their YouTube channel three years ago. It shows a saucer-shaped drone, the ADIFO – All-Directions Flying Object – zipping about the sky. The video claims it’s far more versatile and manouverable than conventional quadcopters as it can move in any direction immediately. It’s designers are, or were, looking for a partner to begin producing the aircraft industrially.

I wonder if this isn’t the only drone like this to have been developed and that some of them may be responsible for UFO sightings.

Wahan Ke Log: The Indian Bond-Style Spy Film with Invading Martians

Okay, here’s something a bit different for this Easter Day. I was looking through the genre film site, Teleport City, yesterday when I came across a review of the 1968 Indian movie Wahan Ke Log. As well as covering western films, Teleport City also has excellent reviews of Asian genre cinema. Much of this is about the various Hong Kong martial arts epics, but it also deals with other countries like India. I’ve no idea what the title means, but the review was fascinating in what it said about the influence of James Bond on Asian cinema at the time and also how the UFO phenomena had reached Asia and influence popular culture over there, at least in the form of this movie. Apparently the success of the Bond films led to the release of a number of similar flicks in Asia, as countries like India sent their suave, elegantly dressed superspies after nefarious villains intent on world conquest. In this case, it was a UFO invasion from Mars. Among the suspects was an Indian scientist, who has invented a laser gun, which his criminal son has gotten hold of and is using for his evil purposes. And yes, there are song and dance numbers as the hero goes into nightclubs to see the female lead sing while knocking back cocktails. In the end it is revealed that the Martian invasion is a hoax, perpetrated by one of India’s Asian rivals, though the review wouldn’t tell you whether this was Pakistan or China. The only hint they gave as to who was responsible was that it wasn’t Burma.

It’s a long review, and I admit, I did no more than skim it. What interested me is what the film says about the global nature of the UFO phenomenon. It first arose in America in the 1950s and so can appear very much as a western phenomenon even though there have been sightings all over the world. The sceptical UFO magazine, Magonia, used to complain that UFO researchers had a simplistic view of non-western cultures when it came to interpreting UFO encounters. They assumed that witnesses from regions like Africa could not be faking their experiences or mixing it up with material from the global UFO culture because, living in such distant parts of the world they were somehow untouched by western popular culture. That this was not so was shown in one UFO documentary where an African UFO witness wore a Michael Jackson T-shirt.

I’d also assumed that there was little in the way of Science Fiction in India. One of the anthologies of SF stories I read in the ’90s included one Indian short story, but stated that there wasn’t much of it. I read elsewhere that when it came to fantastic cinema, the main genre was the ‘Theologicals’ about the Hindu gods. These satisfy the need for the fantastic and cosmic that in the west is catered to by Science Fiction and Fantasy movies. It certainly seems that the majority of science fiction cinema and television from Asia comes from Japan, although China might be starting to catch up with its television adaptation of the Three Body Problem.. I also found it interesting for what it also showed about the nationalistic tensions in Asian cinema as well. Some of the 1950s SF movies have been seen as metaphors for the Communist threat, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or otherwise informed by Cold War paranoia. One of the clearest examples of this is the B-movie The Angry Red Planet, in which the voice of God appears on people’s radios from Mars denouncing Communism. I think. Wahan Ke Log shows that the theme of invasion from outer space could also express the same national and political fears in Indian cinema of covert foreign plots to take over the country.

Not all Indian SF cinema may be so grim, however. A couple of decades ago our local multiplex had posters up for the Bollywood epics it was also showing as well as the latest Hollywood releases. One of them appeared to be about an alien family with large, high craniums landing and living in India. One of the pictures was of the family on a bike trip, their cycle helmets suitably shaped to cover their peculiar noggins. It was only when thinking about it a little later that it occurred to me that this could be India’s answer to the Coneheads. There’s a whole world of SF and space related cinema out there, which takes themes and tropes from the west and adds its own unique experience and views, as countries around the world industrialise and start to explore the High Frontier for themselves.

To read the Teleport City’s review of the film, go to: https://teleport-city.com/2019/08/28/wahan-ke-log/

Opening Scene of SF/Horror Show ‘Lovecraft Country’

Lovecraft Country was a short-lived American SF/Horror series, whose Black hero battled monsters spawned by the vast, alien gulfs of deep space while also trying to navigate his way round real persecution in Jim Crow-era America. It sadly lasted only one season, but this clip of its opening scene shows that it had potential.

I found the clip on Farhan Afsal’s YouTube channel, and, yes, it’s weird. It begins with American soldiers fighting their way along a trench in Black/White, before the picture suddenly erupts into colour with explosions, UFOs and flying Cthulhu creatures. He climbs out of the trench to a chorus of voices asking him where he’s going, ‘Black boy’. A beautiful red-skinned woman wearing precious little descends from a UFO in a beam of light to embrace the hero. The voiceover chattering in the background states that in 1928, every boy’s mind was on baseball. And as Cthulhu rises to threaten the hero, another Black chap in baseball gear knocks it into mush with his bat. He tells the hero not to fear, but the Cthulhu creature then begins to reassemble. It’s all really fascinating, but unfortunately it can only be watched on Afsal’s channel. So if you want to see for yourself what it was like, you’ll have to go there.

The Trans Holocaust Is a Dangerous, Murderous Myth: Liberals Must Combat and Refute It

I hope this isn’t too controversial a post, because I know many of the great commenters here are strong supporters of trans rights. But I hope that whatever our differences, we can agree on this issue: the fear going around the trans community that there is a holocaust either underway or about to come is a toxic myth that may have played a role in the tragic shooting of six people at a Presbyterian school in America on Monday. Audrey Hale, the perpetrator, was a trans-identified woman, who believed she was a transman. She walked into the school with an assault rifle and proceeded to shoot the children and staff before she was shot in the head by the cops. It’s not really known what her motives were, and she is unusual in that while I’ve heard and seen YouTube footage of violence by transwomen, transmen have not, as far as I know, been personally violent. Hale did, however, leave a manifesto, the contents of which have not been disclosed to the public. Right-wing American commenters have claimed that the authorities won’t because they don’t fit the narrative of transpeople being an oppressed minority.

Several YouTubers and other commenters on the Net have made the point that part of the cause of the tragedy lies in the very militant, violent rhetoric among trans militants. I am not going to deny that there is prejudice against transpeople, but there is a real culture of violence amongst the trans militants. Gender critical feminists like Maria MacLachlan, who was herself assaulted by an angry transwoman, have posted a number of videos showing the very aggressive counter demonstrations by trans activists. There is also footage on YouTube of feminist campaigners being beaten to the ground by trans activists in Spain. There is also a feminist site on the Net which regularly posts examples of such violence. Kelly-Jay Keen, a leading trans activist, was mobbed and feared for her life when she spoke in Auckland, New Zealand. Maria MacLachlan has posted video footage of the various aggressive militant trans who greeted her when she spoke in Bristol. The militants were also supported by Antifa, dressed in black bloc, and Bristol Anarchist Federation. They tried to storm the police cordon around the demonstration. Wheeen n she spoke in Bristol the trans militants were supported by Antifa, dressed in black bloc, and Bristol Anarchist Federation. There were similar scenes when she spoke in Brighton, when the counterprotesters let off smoke bombs and one of them, a young guy, was dragged off because Brighton’s finest had found 12 knives in his bag. Similar, highly aggressive displays have been staged by trans rights protesters over the other side of the Pond. In one such instance, a young woman speaking at university was ushered by a cop into a cupboard to hide her from the angry mob chasing her.

And trans militant rhetoric is similarly violent. There are any number of posts on Twitter where the activists display guns with slogans like ‘I Kill TERFs’. Nicola Sturgeon caught flak the other week because, when she was trying to pass the Gender Recognition Bill in Scotland, she stood in front of a flag saying ‘Behead TERFS’ or some such. In their discussion of the recent shooting, the Lotus Eaters have used as their thumbnail a picture of someone standing next to a sign saying ‘Trans Right… Or Else’ with multiple pictures of AK47s.

Many trans activists seem to sincerely believe that gender critical feminists and their supporters are real fascists. This is nonsense, which MacLachlan has also disposed of in another of her videos. My own experience of simply reading their blogs and watching their videos is that far from being any kind of allies of Stormfront and the rest of the jackbooted horrors, real ‘TERFs’ tend instead to be respectable, middle-aged ladies, and that they largely come from the political left. That’s the direction MacLachlan comes from, and KJK started out as a left-wing socialist before she got censured from her Labour feminist group simply for asking why transwomen were women. They seem to be largely women, who marched against real fascism in the shape of the BNP, NF and apartheid South Africa. And they have not, to my certain knowledge, posted anything demanding the murder, let alone the mass murder, of trans people. Not MacLachlan, not the feminists at Redux, not gender critical gays like Clive Simpson, Dennis Kavanagh or the EDIjester, Barry Wall. Not even J.K. Rowling, for whom I have a fair degree of contempt because of her support for the libellous accusations that Mike was an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier, simply because he supported Jeremy Corbyn.

Part of the problem is, I believe, the myth of the trans holocaust. There have been trans days of remembrance held in Britain and Scotland, but the numbers of trans people killed over here has been low. In Scotland they were about three, and no-one was killed last year. This should obviously be a source of pride. The figures are higher in America, but as a section of the population they’re still low. The stats the activists use to show that there is a trans holocaust underway come from Latin America. These are desperately poor countries, and some of them, like Brazil, have horrifically high murder rates anyway. And it’s unclear whether the murdered transpeople were killed because they were trans, or because they were sex workers.

But despite the lack of death camps or paramilitary mobs going from house to house looking for trans people, as happened to the Jews during the real Holocaust, this myth is spreading. The right-wing, anti-trans YouTuber, Arielle Scarcella, who is herself a lesbian, put up a piece in which she reported many trans people are joining the Pink Pistols. This is a network of gun clubs set up by the gay community in America and Canada to teach gay men and women how to shoot in order to defend themselves. I sympathise with the reason for them. There has been a violent hatred of gays in America and Britain, and in a culture like America which supports gun ownership as the citizen’s right to defend him- or herself, it’s natural that gays should also want to own them for their defence. Just like the Black Panthers decided that if the White man had guns, they wanted theirs too. But it means we’ve entered a very dangerous climate where scared, volatile people, afraid of Nazi-style persecution, are taking up arms amid angry rhetoric that calls for and legitimises the killing of their opponents. One internet commenter has even said that, given the circumstances, the shooting was entirely predictable.

This is where I hope genuinely liberal people, people concerned about the deteriorating state of social discourse over this matter can help, and particularly academics. Because we’ve been here before, folks, but from the other political extreme. I have a strong interest in folklore, and was for a time a member of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research. This was set up by academic folklorists to investigate contemporary urban folklore. You know, vanishing hitch-hikers, UFOs, and other weirdness. But this was in the 1990s when the was another spike in American and western paranoia. It was when anyone and seemingly almost everyone with a computer was producing small press magazines or pamphlets ranting about THEM. President George Bush Senior sparked some of it after the Gulf War by talking about his New Order, which harked back to the Nazis’ rhetoric about their new European order, and even further back to the 18th century and the Illuminati and the words printed on dollar bills: Novo Ordo Saecularum – ‘New World Order’. Looking for an underlying explanation for the Gulf War, people found it in the old conspiracy theories about Satanist freemasons. And there were real fears of a resurgence of the militant extreme right following the rise of the Militia movement and Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing. Morris Dees, one of the major figures in the Southern Poverty Law Centre, published a book about their threat and links to the wider American Nazi movement. It’s been widely criticised, not least because one of the captains of one of the militias was actually Black. There were calls from someone who styled herself a militia commander for them to march on Washington DC. But the other militia members smelt an agent provocateur, and wisely kept to running around training in the hills.

The Society also covered some of the weird conspiracy theories going around America. The American far right at that time hadn’t taken in the fact that real, existing state communism in eastern Europe had collapsed. There was a paranoid fringe that believed it was all a ruse. Thus there were bonkers theories that held that the Russians had established secret bases in Canada and Mexico, from which the tanks would roll into America at the given signal. And God-fearing American Christians believed that they would be targeted for extermination under the One World Satanic state. There was a rumour going around Christians in Pennsylvania that the coloured dots on the state’s road signs indicated the sites of the concentration camps in which they were to be interned. It was all false. The dots were part of a code telling state highway workers when the signs had last been painted, so that they knew when they needed another coat. It had nothing to do with concentration camps for anyone.

And then, with 9/11 came the stories about the destruction of the Twin Towers, and the rise of Alex Jones. Jones has become infamous for his wild conspiracy theories. In one of them he claimed that Barack Obama was going to use an environmental emergency to force Americans into refugee camps and seize power to become an eco-communist dictator. And there were other weird attacks on the former president, in which it was claimed that he was secret atheist/Muslim/Communist/Nazi filled with a hatred of White America and planning its extinction. In fact, Obama was in many ways a bog-standard conventional American politician. He saw himself, as he’s said recently, as a moderate Republican. And there’s a very strong continuity between his bombing of Libya and continuation of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, with Neo-Con foreign policy.

Well, Obama’s been and gone. he was succeeded by Trump, who was succeeded by Biden. There are no concentration camps for anyone. But the ideas of a trans holocaust are merely an extreme left-wing version of the right-wing American fears about a holocaust of Whites and Christians. And it needs people to point this out. During the ’90s and after there were a number of academic books published about the paranoid fringe in America, sometimes as part of wider examinations of conspiracy theories like the infamous Jewish banking myth that inspired Hitler and the Nazis. This new myth of the trans holocaust needs putting in the same context. The fact that it comes from the left, and a minority group that sees itself as vicious marginalised and oppressed, should make no difference. It’s a myth, a dangerous myth, that does seem to be inspiring militant trans activists to violence. And the internet platforms should be helping as well. Nobody should be allowed to post material genuinely calling for the murder of others. It should be immediately struck down. Protests that it’s all a joke should not be tolerated. Since the rise of political correctness in the 1980s people find racist jokes genuinely distasteful. I cannot imagine decent people finding anything funny in jokes about killing Blacks and Jews. And the so-called jokes about killing TERFS shouldn’t be tolerated either. As for masked individuals turning up in black bloc threatening violence, that could be solved by invoking the legislation passed in the 1930s that outlawed paramilitary uniforms. It was aimed at Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. I think it may have become a dead-letter because of the paramilitary violence in Ulster. But there’s a strong case for enforcing it over here.

We have to fight the poisonous myths and paranoia in the militant trans community.

Before someone else with serious mental issues and anger against society because they fear they’re going to be put into a concentration camp because of their gender identity goes on another killing spree.

Mathematician Eric Weinstein Wonders If Aliens Have an FTL Drive Not Based on Einsteinian Physics

This one is more for the science and space nerds among the readers of this blog. This video is a short piece from Eric Weinstein’s appearance on the Joe Rogan show. Weinstein’s an American mathematician who’s seriously dissatisfied with the state of physics and cosmology at the moment. In a previous video he takes square aim at Quantum Gravity. This is an attempt to unify two very different theories – Einstein’s theory of relativity, which works extremely well on the macro level, but doesn’t extend to the quantum world, and quantum physics, which is the opposite. It works extremely well at the level of atomic particles, but doesn’t work at the level of people, planets, cars and the like. Weinstein’s complaint is that great minds have worked for over 70 years on Quantum Gravity without any success. However, because of the prestige of some of the great minds promoting the theory, like Ed Witten and the author Michio Kaku, people are still pursuing it and anyone who speaks against it is regarded as a crank. Weinstein has come up with his own theory, Geometric Unity, which posits there are 4 or 6 extra dimensions.

In this video he talks about Faster Than Light travel. He’s dismissive of the Alcubierre drive, which states that it may be possible to create a warp drive by warping space around the space ship. It sounds like he doesn’t believe it would work because the force of gravity is so weak. The Earth’s gravity barely warps space, for example. He believes that if aliens do have a space drive, it operates on a theory that has transcended Einstein. This would involve there being several dimensions of time. He describes how time might work if there are two or three dimensions of it, but then it becomes impossible for physicists at the moment to imagine what it would be like with more. He says that physicists imagine there being extra physical dimensions all the time, but the only physicist imagining what it would be like if there were two dimensions of time is Turkish Jewish fellow. And indeed only a little while ago there was a refereed scientific paper suggesting Faster Than Light travel could be possible if our universe did have two temporal dimensions.

This is advanced physics at the level where it starts to hurt the brain. Weinstein, however, appears to believe that UFOs are real, or that there is a genuine conspiracy around them. I also wondered if multiple temporal dimensions would explain John Keel’s Ultraterrestrials and some of the tales about the fairies. I’m think here of the tales in which someone stumbles or is abducted into fairyland, and when they finally emerge into the normal world centuries have passed although to them it has been only minutes or hours.

1960s Logging Footage with UFO-Shaped Blimp

I found this interesting little video on the Wellness Cottage channel on YouTube. It’s of newly released film footage of logging from the 1960s, which includes a balloon which looks rather like a UFO. I haven’t watched all of it, just the first few minutes as I’m really not interested in logging. But what I do find interesting is that the Americans were clearly using dirigibles like this to lift the fallen tree trunks onto the trucks and vehicles. And I very much wonder how long the Americans carried on using them, as it might explain, or help to explain, the Travis Walton abduction.

Walton was a member of logging team, who was supposedly abducted and examined by aliens aboard a UFO in 1976 or so. His story was later filmed in the ’90s as Fire in the Sky, with James Garner as the sceptical sheriff. There have been allegations that he abduction was a fraud, as the logging team were behind in their work and Walton himself had a chequered past. He also failed a polygraph test the first time he took it, but passed the second. But polygraphs don’t necessarily prove anything, only that the person taking them has a bad response to questions. It’s why, I believe, they’re inadmissible in court.

From what I remember of the film, Walton’s team were coming back at night when the saw a red light in the sky. Walton got out, and was hit by a strange light. I can’t remember if he disappeared, or the others simply took fright and left him. After several days missing, he turns up in one of his friends and neighbour’s houses naked and shivering and cowering in fear. I’ve no idea what really happened. But it occurred to me that if there was a similar blimp operating in the area, possibly it could have been an element in the abduction, which was really an internal, psychological experience. Which is not to say that the experience wouldn’t have been terrifyingly real to Walton.

But this is just my speculation. It could well be that the blimps had stopped being used by the time Walton had his experience, or that even if they were still being used, they were nowhere near him and his fellow lumberjacks. I’m sceptical about UFO abductions, but perhaps he really was kidnapped by aliens.

The Smuggling of the Hungarian Crown Jewels to America: the Archetype for the Later Crash Retrieval Stories?

Just watched a very interesting talk from ASSAP, a paranormal study group, on Zoom tonight about the 1977 ITV UFO hacking. This was an incident in which someone hacked into ITN news at 5.10 on a Saturday evening purporting to be an alien delivering a message of peace and warning us against using our weapons. Viewers saw the customary newsreader, but the audio was replaced by this message from Ashtar, Villon, or Gillon of Space Command. The hack was confined to a part of the Southern Television ITV network, so only people in Dorset and Hampshire saw it, although obviously it was national news the next day. The Independent Broadcasting Authority stated it was a hoax, but obviously there were questions about how they could know. The theories were that it was done by Ufologists trying to make people interested in their subject, or just hoaxers who knew a little bit about it. They’ve now tracked down the probably hoaxer, Bob Tomalski, a ‘gadget guru’ who certainly did know his way around broadcasting engineering, but who believed passionately in broadcasting freedom and had been involved in pirate radio. It was an open secret amongst his friends that he was responsible.

But the speaker, Neil Nixon, warned that the incident showed how technology could be used to fake paranormal events and you have to be sceptical about some of the evidence presented. And the military and intelligence services are not above spreading false stories about UFOs. The examples he gave were of Richard Doty, a secret agent responsible for sending Paul Bennewitz insane. Bennewitz was a military contractor, who believed he was seeing UFOs flying in and out of Kirtland Air Force Base. In fact he was seeing top secret research craft, and Doty was one of two agents sent to curtail his interests by spinning stupid yarns and giving him falsified information about UFOs before telling him that it was all fake.

The other example was the smuggling of the crown of St. Stephen, part of the Hungarian crown jewels, out of the country to America in 1956. The servicemen involved were told, however, that it was the engine and wings of a UFO. The speaker argued that if formed the classic pattern for later crash retrieval stories, in which special troops from the army or air force recover a downed UFO and bring it back to a secret base for study. In the case of the crown of St. Stephen, it went to Fort Knox.

A really interesting tale, but I think the archetype of the later crash retrieval accounts was the Roswell incident, regardless of whether you believe it to be a genuine crashed alien spacecraft or a mogul spy balloon.