Bennett Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Review of Colin Bennett’s Politics of the Imagination

by Tony Grist

Published by Headpress 40 Rossall Avenue, Radcliffe, Manchester M26 1JD ISBN 1 900486 20 2

Source: http://www.nhi.clara.net/bs0470.htm

Charles Fort (1874-1932) was a saint of scholarship, a garret-dweller who dedicated his life to the collection, classification and interpretation of anomalous events. The typical Fortean event would be something like the downpour of frogs that concludes Thomas Anderson's cult movie, MAGNOLIA. It is absurd, unaccountable and cannot be fitted into the rationalist-scientific model of the world and how it works.

Fort's remit extended to UFOs — long before they were so named, cryptozoology and so-called "paranormal" phenomena like teleportation and telepathy. His purpose in drawing attention to the cracks in everyday "reality" was to expose scientific orthodoxy for the fraud he believed it was. The scientific establishment's reaction to the anomalous has always been to disregard it. By piling up thousands of examples of the weird and peculiar, Fort aimed to make that attitude of disregard a little more difficult to sustain.

He was, of course, disregarded himself. He published four books in his lifetime, but is only now coming into his own. POLITICS OF THE IMAGINATION should, if there is any justice in the world, carry this process forward. Bennett argues for Fort both as an important thinker and as a writer of genius. He compares him to Joyce, Kafka, Orwell and Thomas Mann. The quotations that dot the text bear him out. They are complex, syntactically challenged, playful, witty, visionary, astounding. I am a convert. And by the time I was halfway though the book I was placing an order on Amazon for Fort's Collected Works.

Bennett himself is a writer in the Fortean vein. His writing is poetic and difficult. It rages at the boundaries of what is sayable and thinkable as it argues for a way of perceiving the world which does not cramp the imagination the way the scientific paradigm does. Following Fort, Bennett suggests that imagination is itself a factor in the creation of the world as we experience it. Science attempts to reduce the universe to facts — but in so doing it has to disregard whole swathes of what actually occurs. The paradigm that Bennett favours is the Renaissance one — the universe of Hamlet and King Lear — in which the inner world of the imagination and the outer world of Nature are not distinct but continuous, in which thought and emotion reach out into the realm of matter and mould it into sympathetic shapes.

This is a remarkable and important book. No-one who reads it with an open mind is going to emerge unshaken.

Tony Grist

                        Source: http://www.nhi.clara.net/bs0470.htm

                       Review of Colin Bennett’s Looking for Orthon  by Brenda Denzler

from the Journal of Scientific Exploration, Autumn, 2003oys 2

 Source: http://www.scientificexploration.org

                  Was George Adamski a genuine contactee or just a con-man? Did he have real experiences with Venusian or was he making it all up? For those seeking a straightforward historical narrative with simple yes-or-no answers to these questions, Looking for Orthon is not likely to be a satisfying read. But for those who can tolerate an answer yes-and-no, Colin Bennett’s book is a sheer delight. Unlike other writers who have tried to make sense of Adamski and his claims of alien contact, Bennett tries less to weigh and judge the raw historical facts of the claims than to come to terms with the mythico-psycho-social parameters of them.

      But this is not an attempt to turn the UFO phenomenon into nothing more than a collective fantasy which can therefore be dismissed, with Adamski serving as the chief delusional instigator. Instead, Bennett suggest that UFOs are an “evolving part-fiction” that works on real and unreal levels at the same time by combining deception with “more convincing elements” (p.76. pp 169-70). Thus if we take the phenomenon seriously, he says, we may to replace the “real” versus the “unreal dichotomy altogether (p.206).

      The life of George Adamski, in Bennett’s hands, becomes the paradigmatic example of the 1950s and 60s contactees. A 20th century shaman bringing banished bits of reality back into the life of Western culture. Adamski before his experiences seemed to lead a life that was, “in any bourgeois sense at least, a complete waste of time (p.203). But the experience that he reported transformed him into “the White Rabbit of the 20th century” (p. 65) who, in an act of “visionary cheek” exerted an enormous influence on Western culture. “Our world would have been a much more comfortable place had Adamski been proved to be an imposter,” notes Bennett. But that kind of proof was not to be had. Yet there is also no doubt that Adamski was a “likeable rogue who at times “tarted up” some of his experiences. And for Bennett, that may explain it all: “He and others like him may forever be the prey of a process that chooses them precisely because they most willingly create new episodes to follow from the first ‘genuine’ episode.” After that, they “become hopeless addicts” who create ever more dubious –and more absurd- reports.

      According to this interpretation of events, Adamski could not have become the “metaphysical Pied Piper” that he did without the collusion of the UFO-nauts themselves, who, Bennett suspects, may not be so much deceiving (us) as trying to make good guesses and making an unwittingly comic hash of it.” Or, less charitably, the intelligences behind the UFOs may be using humanity not for “slavery, exploitation, experimentation, or even food. We may be just used as a joke,” a source of “story-protein” that nourishes an intelligence for whom such complex play is the meaning of existence. And that, of course would be “psychologically devastating” to our collective pride.

This may in part explain why it is that government officials took an interest in Adamski from early-on (p. 28, p. 30, p. 135). Plant a bomb and the State knows how to deal with you,” Bennett observes. “Say you met a man from Venus and far deeper State anger out of all proportion to your nonexistent physical threat (p.125) because Authority “knows that vital new images can change society just as can ‘fact.’ Authority therefore watches image-makers.” The many verifications of Adamski’s claims that came pouring in after publication of Flying Saucers Have Landed in 1953 created a climate of “delicious insanity” (p. 69, p. 33) and revealed the existence of a plethora of apparently odd people that Authority could not ignore. “Odd folks trouble Authority,” notes Bennett, “if only because it doesn’t understand them…the odd person is made to feel that no matter how small they may be…they have nevertheless been noticed” (p. 41). And as a ringleader of the odd, Adamski was definitely noticed – not only by officials but by all of Western culture, as his claims “sponsored debate on the deepest and most interesting levels concerning the most important matters” (p. 176).

Looking for Orthon is the kind of book you get when the forces described in Jacques Vallee’s Passport to Magonia are studied as they manifest in the concrete life of one man and thereby leave their mark upon a culture. That mark is as much one of buffoonery as of revelation. Other venerable UFO researchers, like James Moseley, have also suggested that whatever intelligence lies behind the UFO phenomenon may be “having us on,” as Bennett maintains. The difference between Bennett’s take and Moseley’s however, is that while Moseley focuses on deceptions and inconsistencies in saucer reports as obscuring and distorting whatever truth there may be behind the phenomenon, Bennett focuses on such inconsistencies as signs of an inevitable linkage between hoax and reality, fiction and fact.

Bennett is the first postmodern thinker from within the UFO community to tackle the subject of UFOs (see Jodie Dean for an example of someone more on the outskirts of the UFO community who uses postmodernism to evaluate ufology as a social phenomenon). Postmodernism has been around in the academy for decades; the fact that it is just now filtering down into UFO-dom is telling. The cries of “That makes no sense!” that are being heard from  the more traditional thinkers are all very familiar, too. But postmodernism is slowly losing ground in the academy. It seems to have been a tool that bored into anything it touched and brought up new ways of thinking about things and new insights – yet like all tools, it has its limitations. I doubt that this way of approaching ufology will be the last word, though it might take some time to run its course in the field and give us whatever it is capable of giving. Meanwhile, the cries of tormented and confused ufologists who are faced with postmodernist takes on their subject are almost predictable. But for those who can face defining the box, then thinking outside of it, Bennett’s book is well worth the effort.