Swamp Gas Times by Patrick Huyghe:

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Paraview Special Editions (June 1, 2001)
• ISBN: 1931044279

Review by Colin Bennett

H.G. Wells once wrote An Experiment in Autobiography, and this title is a good description of Swamp Gas Times by Patrick Huyghe. There are very few books about UFOs that put the phenomenon in a setting of the character and atmosphere of a workaday journalistic world.

Patrick was the first (and probably the last) writer to get a major article on UFOs published in the New York Times in October, 1979. Here are no less than fifty-four pieces of major ufological reportage by him, almost all of which appeared in a wide variety of print and electronic media outlets, including the first tentative “web radio” experiments in the 1990s. Some were written in retrospect, others written up by Patrick during his twenty years as investigator, writer, and presenter. There is never a dull or laboured moment as he tells of the UFO involvements of Richard Doty, John Lear, Bruce Maccabee, and Peter Gersten, and may others. He is also at the cross-stitching of time, personality and purpose. He describes the initial formation of NIDS and CUFOS, and the feeling of being watched over by hawk-eyed editors and lawyers as he gives accounts of claimed CIA/NSA involvement in UFO disinformation,

His vision raises the sheer thrill of our dawning realization that we are indeed living within domains of high strangeness. The Linda Cortille abduction alone as described is as utterly fantastic story, and is said to have involved Mikhail Gorbachev and Perez de Cuellar, no less. There are many more such modern tales, including up-and-down personal encounters with Philip Klass, J. Alan Hynek, and Budd Hopkins.

What makes this remarkable book special is that it relates all these matters to American journalism as it evolved over two decades. Both journalism and the UFO inhabit unstable worlds; magazines, newspapers and staff are shown as being in an almost constant state of change. Editors, private financiers, policies, all can change within a matter of months. Given that UFOs were the only things Patrick ever wanted to write about, the notorious ability of the UFO to stay just out of focus of the discursive eye added to the thrills and spills of his experience of writing for a living.

Making this situation yet more unstable again were the earth-shaking changes that printing and publishing went through in the 80s and nineties. Quite revolutionary new technologies and working practices, were introduced, most of which Patrick experienced in one form or another. Thus his UFO reporting is against a professional background of varying levels of ever-changing technology, the whims of rich proprietors, and a rapidly changing print and media culture, changing again in turn as regards content and style, taste, fashion, and evolving social history. We see in Swamp Gas Times the UFO as a live cryptozoological animal, grazing on information flow as it moves through many different dimensions and interpretations of media, opinion, and changing forms of fashionable taste and expression.

Patrick worked for Omni magazine for quite some time in the 1990s. Though it had a million readers, Bob Guccione pulled the plug on it in March 1998, for reasons which remain obscure. As one of the earliest experiments at a New Age high-quality mag/web interface it was historic, and the primitive (“new”) technology led to some wonderful creative moments in what became “web radio.” According to Patrick’s edifying account, the entry of this new medium was almost as thrilling as tweaking the crystal set in 1910. On one notable occasion in 1997 whilst presenting the slot “High Strangeness,” as part of Omni’s “Prime Time Live” schedule, Patrick found himself at the unstable cutting edge of measuring a disintegrating ruler with an equally unstable ruler in terms of Above Black author Dan Sherman telling an equally uncertain tale of military recovery of alien craft. There were failed connections, difficulties in logging on and off, giving a presenter the very worst problems in terms of suddenly disappearing guests, to mention just one difficulty.

After this, we are not permitted to smile at the old picture of Dame Nelly Melba before a meat-safe microphone again. The Dan Sherman web-event moved towards might be called information as art form, and it is archived at www.Omnimag.com.

It is certainly a case of the uncertainties of the media matching the uncertainties of the message.

Of course, if just one strand of Sherman’s claims were true, then the world would be turned on its head almost immediately. His  account of an utterly fantastic event presents an immensity lodged between several kinds of absurdity within technology and communications, information and presentation. At least one vector of the strange machines seen in the skies of the earth is made of this mélange.

Which makes them very strange machines indeed, partaking of objectivity and subjectivity, and time present and time past.

Each piece of reportage is introduced by a background comment, at times almost as fascinating as the main piece itself. Often an up-date to the matter in hand is added in the form of a postscript. This is a good method, because we see three integrated dimensions to the text at the same time. This kind of controlled focus is particularly good for the UFO, which as a manifestation can make more chess moves involving acceptance/denial more quickly than can any Russian master on a good day.

Patrick is professionally very skilled. He is also concise and clear. There is atmosphere and personal tension; there is ambition, resentment, and disappointment. Over these things is a perceptible shadow of time;  we doubt, in these more cynical days if the author would describe Hynek as a “modern Galileo” now.

In presenting these stories (many still developing even at this late hour). Patrick avoids writing yet another railway-line book where the UFO stories (almost all of which have been treated extensively elsewhere) are word-processed and strung up like smoked herrings.  Though some of the stories are somewhat tired by now, Patrick makes them live again as quite authentic layers of modern experience, the trails of which go right under the hill to that Kafkaresque castle called the modern state, or the military-industrial complex by any other name

These stories are of a world full of hairline cracks and fissures, a world constantly crumbling at the edges of the discursive investigational eye like a Max Escher drawing of possible impossibilities.  Here indeed is a kind of Matrix world, complete with pantomime elements worthy of the most outrageous surrealist visions. In the face of such things, Patrick, indeed like John Keel, manages to combine a vigorous analytic logic with a brave ability to face the utterly absurd elements in many of the experiences he describes. For the two faculties to work together is rare in ufological writing. Patrick has also even more rare a faculty. He has genuine empathy for these “Bigfoot” tales as his friend and colleague Loren Coleman has for anomalous animal forms.

Here is great insight, as well as the irresistible thrill of ufology: this collection of reported events suggests a world that transcends completely the world of the socio-economic input/output equations that structure our known localized consciousness. We prefer the world that we can most comfortably live with. We use sceptical rationalism not to seek for truth, but as a controlling limitation in order to get some sleep at night. We lie in order to dream.

All these stories show that process of denial of course is just as interesting as the process of belief. Eventually there is an adjustment, a carve-up in the market places of the psyche in order to mount that old clapboard fraud we call “reality.”

Colin Bennett

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.