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Combat Diary 11 |
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Escapees celebrate the arrival of Combat Diary 11 Panzerben's
Colour Supplement
Mk 2 "When the world begins to behave as you think it should behave, be at your most suspicious." Postmodern Equation: INPUT=old torn poster of Marilyn Monroe; OUTPUT=Infinity |
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Dear Beloved Escapees, Contents: Chapter 2: The Memory of Water by Jacques Benveniste. Chapter 3: The Adventures of Panzerben. Chapter 4: Thoughts on Abductions by Bill E. Budd Chapter 5: Extraordinary Claim? Move the Goal Posts! by Patrick Huyghe, author of Swamp Gas Times. Chapter 6: Posthuman Possibilities and the Future of Intelligent Life by José Cordeiro Chapter 7: Short Story: The Latex Princess by the Bad Man Chapter 8: The Adventures of Prod and Tonto By Albertus Magnus. A monthly soap opera about a pair of sceptical UFO researchers recently given the Fortean Times UFO column. Not to be missed. Any resemblance to living characters is quite deliberate. Apologies to non-English speakers. This language is known to folklorists as Yorkshire Relish. Chapter 9 : Invasion of the Para-Apes by Donald Lewis. Events and Information Mary Rodwell, author of Awakening (Fortune Books 2002)
gave a brilliant talk at the Leeds Conference recently. Mary will be
speaking in London 4th October, and in Cornwall 11th October, 2003. Her
new domain addresses are:
www.maryrodwell.com and
www.acern.com.au Book Reviews Meet the Team of Panzerben:
And many others too numerous to mention whose faces
cannot be shown due to many issues and considerations and mishaps
extraordinary. These mainly involve Social Security, Probation officers,
Social workers, the banks, the police, the judiciary, psychiatrists, the
Law, alien abductors, Men in Black, the Security Services, and in certain
cases Parents, film & TV producers and parents. Many of these young
escapees are suffering from bad liberal burn from the everlasting idiot’s
lantern, and conversations about gear boxes, DIY, sport, and something
called the Economy. Unfortunately we have to hand back many of those who
have made it successfully over the perimeter wire, if only to see living
screens that offer better viewing and in most case at least, have no
license fee. Coming in the July 2003 Issue: -Perfect Bound: The new Fortean Times -Part 2 of the Scientist as Hero -Further adventures of Panzerben -Introduction to Postmodernism Part 1 -More "real" UFO investigations
of Scargill the Prod and Tonto. In this Episode 2, the Big Prod goes to
see The Brentford Polonius (the Editor of Magonia Magazine) for advice. He
has fallen in love with twenty-stone Brenda 'Ardcastle, the last woman
collier in Macclesfield, and wants to know how to get rid of that mystical
enchantment he hates and despises. The trouble with Brenda 'Ardcastle is
that she not only does she still wear clogs, she is an ardent UFO believer
in the bargain. What is our hero to do? What advice will The Brentford
Polonius give? Will it be real? Will Brenda 'Ardcastle ever replace
Georgina, the Big Prod's last Grand Passion?
Editorial The essay on alien abductions by Bill Budd and para-apes by Donald Lewis included in this June 2003 issue of the Combat Diaries suggests that what we so easily call "reality" may be much more complex than we have ever realized. In vain do we try and simplify the world and ourselves. This results in what might be termed wonder management rather then the absurdly simple "facts" versus "fictions." Anyone who believes that the world consists of such simple distinctions should visit a magistrate's court first thing on a Monday morning to have such thoughts cast out forever. In this respect, I suggest we reconsider what contact with an "advanced" intelligence (or a number of very different ones simultaneously) might be like. Such might consist of many shades of being, from an image on junior's puffer-train to the utterly fantastic events of the Linda Cortile case. Therefore instead of the very WASP image of a worthy bourgeois alien doing very recognizable bourgeois things, we might well meet very advanced form of levels of play. In my opinion, this is what such people as Adamski and Corso met up with, and they both became confused when dealing with entities that played confusion games with them with just about as much respect as regards their dignity and state of mind as we had for black African slaves of 1800. Just read about what stone-age Pacific island cargo-cults did with old black-and-white images of Garry Cooper, bits of crashed B29 bombers and tins of Spam, and we have just about got it right as concerns what is probably happening to us at this very moment in time. The human mind is not a machine. It was not designed for accuracy, stability, rationality, or mechanical logic of any kind. It was built to manufacture countless transcendental options, whose "being" and "reality" varies awell a strangelong a scale from sold to vaporous. We navigate mentally by hoaxing ourselves, by creative hallucinations; we wind these things up like toys and watch them click and weeze their faltering way to east of the sun and west of the moon. When we look into ourselves, we see that we are made up of impostures numberless, like an Eiffel Tower made of watch and clock parts.
I am asked frequently why I wrote a book about George Adamski. I first got interested in him because everybody called him an imposter. By this I mean that he was holistcally near the forms I have here described. Many boasted about having “exposed” Adamski’s frauds, trickery, and his chronic deceptions concerning his UFO photographs and his stories of contact with extraterrestrial beings in the early 1950s. At the time I first came across his books in 1965, I was sorry that he died in that year, if only because I would have liked to write to him just to see what monstrous lies came back in reply, so that I could properly join the ranks of his accusers. Such a number of deceptions and variety of impostures seemed to me at the time to be almost impossible for one man to achieve in one lifetime. I imagined even 12-year-olds having a quick smoke behind the bike sheds swapping boasting stories about how they exposed George Adamski. Thus did Adamski’s 1953 book, Flying Saucers Have Landed, written with Desmond Leslie, introduce me to intellectual eroticism for the first time. This book was an effective antidote to the highly suspicious facts, calculations, and certainties of the chalk-gray schoolmasters around me. The thought that these men were telling lies far greater than any told by George Adamski impressed me even at that tender age. The vast demoniacal architecture of the “factual” conspiracy scared me a little, a fear and suspicion that was to remain with me all my life. Yes, Adamski's book had arrived like a guiding lamp in the dark. In the great meantime, I now had friends George Adamski and Diana Dors, every boy's actress pin-up at the time. These were my surrogate parents. Adamski raised the phallus of the mind. Diana Dors took care of the rest. They were the parents I always wanted. Suitably born, I was a true young citizen of the burgeoning Entertainment State and its first primitive virtual realities. Later, as my troubled youth got more complicated by the hour, Adamski’s Orthon was to be joined by Keel’s Mothman as yet more rebel books arrived by the month. At times I imagined Adamski so exposed that he became almost invisible, and had to wear clothes around his nothingness, rather like the Invisible Man of the H.G. Wells story. Since those innocent times, the need to disbelieve the claims of such UFO contactees as Adamski became a kind of inverse sacrament for the conformist rationalists and sceptics of different generations to his schoolmasters. Adamski was certainly intellectual heresy incarnate. He attracted accusations of any and every kind of falsehood and chicanery. Like mega-famous movie stars, I imagined Adamski (rather like Lee Oswald indeed) often got out of bed in the morning eager to read about what mischief his many alter egos had got up to in the world overnight. I often imagine Adamski's space brothers and sisters as airy doppelgangers breaking out of the pseudo-fictions of pseudo-plots to weave shadow-stories of their own, strewing urban legends like biblical sowers of seeds. Like Lee Harvey Oswald (another man who walked through 20th century walls), I imagined Adamski so built of blatant accusations that a hand could be put through the mechanism of quasi-rumour that made up his pseudo flesh and blood. He was built and designed for the world of the UFO and all its inspirations and mysteries. A man of the Edge, he was built of those complex cultural advertisements that in future years were to replace the “objective facts” of the old previous old engine-shed world with its inputs and outputs, all to be shredded by Entertainment State like a newspaper under rain. Like Oswald again, putting together a single coherent twenty-four-hour frame of George Adamski’s life was difficult. The lives of most contactees were shaky, stage-board flats of conspiracy laid upon conspiracy. If such people do anything at all, they remind us of the mysteries forever surrounding those strange creatures called human beings. They remind us that we do not know what personality is, or where human identities begin and end within the mysteries of time and consciousness. Adamski was a prime candidate for burning. He was witch-hunted just as the so-called communists of Adamski’s time were hunted by Senator Joe Macarthy. It is still a mystery to me just how Adamski missed permanent incarceration for breaking the structure of the world. Wilhelm Reich and Timothy Leary were not so lucky. I saw him as a hero straight out of The Catcher in the Rye, possibly captured by left-wing social workers and right-wing psychiatrists, or both sets of controllers at the same time, so little do their targets differ. In my mind I saw Adamski sitting staring into space in the tatty lounge of one of those liberal concentration camps so well described in Ken Kesey’s book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, another great rebel manual. I imagined him destroyed by ECT shocks, “experimental” drug “therapy” or perhaps assassinated by priests or scientists, or some other group of reality-managers. What was Adamski’s crime? Like my Diana Dors, he stirred up the great god-guarded Imagination, and he exercised one of the first great Refusals to Believe of the post-war world. As such, Adamski was a prototype postmodern, designed and built for the impostures of our Entertainment State just as were the “scientists” who were to ridicule and destroy him. It took me many years to come to the conclusion that science was just as much junk-culture as was Adamski’s much-abused second book, Inside the Spaceships. Nearly a half century after his death, Adamski still disturbs and infuriates; denials and accusations still pursue his fleeting form as he enters the Star realms of Mesmer, and Cagliostro, Crowley and Blavatsky. He was star-stuff, and as such he can no more been seen “factually” than can Marilyn Monroe, Roswell, Candy Jones, Ray Palmer, and Jack Parsons; like these things, he was a marvellously complex transformation symbol. His flesh and bones mattered little. He was pure Personality, and he was at the dawn of a new time when the atoms of Isaac Newton were transforming into Personalities. Personality is not about “solid objects” it is about smells and echoes, touch, sound; personality is pure nostalgia for the infinite magic of live individuality, the mysteries of being alive. Adamski and others like him introduced me to a vastly more powerful way of “knowing” than the village blacksmith “factual art” of sceptics, that is something born of Polytechnic ledger-clerks and those who would complain that Winston Churchill’s History of the English Speaking Peoples does not contain any statistics. Such scepticism is usuall derived from both the Old and the New Left, politically-correct social-study courses, and an indigenous Protestantism. As a non-Christian, I did note that the Vatican had no problems with UFOs or beings such as Orthon. I If facts existed at all, I used
them as preliminary sketches in mind-margins as suggestions for journeys
within personalities, and I soon discarded them. As I said to a baffled
English Don at the time, I was as interested in facts as Leonardo would
have been interested in the bra size of the Mona Lisa. His reply was that
I was going to have a difficult time at Oxford, which proved to be true.
Rubbish, I hear you all cry? Eileen Buckle in her 1967 Book The Scoriton Mystery,[1] includes a clear full-plate photograph of Arthur Bryant. Tired, world- weary UFO investigators should take a look at this photograph. They will be looking at the young George Adamski.
Arthur Bryant |
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Chapter 1 click here |
All straight
factual goody two-shoes beware: there is no fair play, democracy,
political correctness, and certainly no blessed objective balance in
Panzerben's Colour
Supplements. Now having clasped that oxygen
mask thankfully to your profoundly grateful 21st century head, breathe
deep, prepare for rescue from those who are after the ass of your
imagination. And remember that Panzerben's
Colour Supplements are
not here to educate, inform or convert you. Their sole object is to
offer the greatest intellectual sex you have ever experienced.
FortWatch:
Dr. Patricia “Arson” Farson. A stout, rough-sleeping street magician, a
magical vampire person, and UFO Contactee. She acquired her middle name in
an incident that South Kensington remembers to this very day. Often her
copy is delivered by one of her many social workers and/or probation
officers. Hard at work on her autobiography, Memoirs of a Fallen
Programmer. This picture of her is entitled Heroine Contemplates the
Infinite in W11. Reckons she's an immortal. Manager of Dream Echelon, a
Portobello group that's been rehearsing for n years. Trendy.
Upper-middle-class. Parents long in despair. Had great hopes after the
public launch of their debutante daughter. In next issue, she reveals in
detail the full extent of the secret take-over of the Fortean Times by
Magonian sceptics, and requests that the magazine be re-entitled The
British Sceptical Enquirer because now, in her opinion, it has as much to
do with Charles Fort as the inside of her ****. Is said to be preparing
also a pen-portrait of Paul Sieveking that this editor hopes is fit to
publish.
The
Adventures of Prod and Tonto: this house of Panzerben soap-opera is
written by Albertus Magnus M.A. (Oxon). Albertus is a Balliol Man from the
age of Dreadnaughts, like Panzerben himself. Like Socrates, Albertus
sleeps in a different place each night, and says that he will come to a
similar end. He boasts the finest Social Security record in Merry England,
and has to be forced into the communal hot tub on many an occasion. We get
his Prod and Tonto copy via his guide dog, fitted with an Intuitive
Inertial Navigation chip. Possible early MKULKTRA victim. Celebrated
Portobello casualty. Remembers Peter Cook when he lived above Shac-Shac.
Buy him a drink and he'll tell you about how Christine Keeler was a real
chum, OZ magazine busts, and the International Times, etc etc.etc. 
Investigations:
Dr. Betty “Shackster” Baxter from Darkest Knightsbridge, the
greatest computer hacker since the great Fred Klaxon of Wakefield (RIP).
Left her signatures at Sellafield, CERN, and Los Alamos. Difficult to find
at any one time. In permanent hiding. Rents a Faraday Cage to write. This
drives her NSA implants wild on occasion, as can be seen from this rare
sketch, done during a brief appearance at the 2002 North Kensington Abductee
Convention. Said to be Fifth on the CIA kill-on-sight list. Very trendy.
Pre-war drawling accent. Overbred, with good blood from somewhere. Fine
bones. Manchester girl, of course. 
Defence
and Security: Arfer Cadaver of the south-of-river mob. Not far from
Panzerben at all times since there are those who would bash the Leader on
the head for believing in Santa Claus and Orthon from Venus. Arfer’s own
conception was just as immaculate: Verdun, the Marne, Waterloo, and the
Battle of Hastings (1963). Managers Milwall Aggravation Unlimited football
club. Got the great best pseudo-stereophonised doo-wop collection in
Ladbroke Grove, although he doesn’t look the type. Ex Leeds scrap
merchant. TV parts coming up. That is if he can stay out of trouble.
Retreat,
Counselling, and Confessions: run by Jim “Sapper” Fish (ex
Parachute Regiment) and his girl-friend Sarah “Morroco” Parsons. Their
Sceptical Rescue & Reform Scheme (K&C grant applied for) is now the bane
of all Magonians. This scheme cares for all manic-depressive nail-biting
po-faced pelicans, dazed and confused rationalists, and all those suffer
from exposure to deadly fundamentalist media and Proddish radiation.
24-hour emergency service for Confessions from all casualties from the
sceptical chapels. Camp beds reserved for difficult moments of
doubt about the Real. Cold Turkey isolation, hot cocoa and sick bowls
available free of charge for all crises of belief in Fact
and “concrete
evidence.” The pair run special care facilities to treat the nightmares of
garage-rationalists, Utilitarians, and the fear of the over-educated,
fallen left-liberals, and any other suchlike who come to the House of
Panzerben for holistic relief. Nice pair, but watch out for their two
Rottweilers that come in handy sometimes when crises of Belief occur and
Magonians try to snatch back doubting pelicans, as Christians try to
snatch back converts who have wandered into infamous "cults" and happen to
be having the time of their lives. It is the time of their lives that must
be stopped first of all. The change of belief comes a bad second. They
must be got back to the parlour TV immediately as if it were a
life-support machine. Both dude dressers. Never appear to sleep. Both from
Newcastle. Addicted clubbers. Still keep the accent, it being very trendy
indeed down Westbourne Grove all nighters, such as Soho House by the
Electric Cinema. 
Cook,
Domestic and Manservant: The Seething Elmon (so called because he
is in a permanent bad temper). He is seen here with the rest of the
domestic staff of the house of Panzerben at his fiftieth birthday party.
His constant complaint is that he was thrown out of what he call "the big
house on the hill" to do the domestic work of the house of Panzerben, whom
he refers to in private as "that fallen kike." What he does not tell you
is what he was thrown out if the big house for. Neither do I dare tell in
case of losing readers of this site. Still, he makes a good communal pot
for the Panzerben Team, and comes in handy with his frying pan (salvaged
from the old Ark Royal), whenever serious metaphysical doubts occur and
threaten to run out of control in the small hours. Favourite team:
Manchester United. Ex-Royal Navy cook out of Liverpool. I have heard him
called Dorothy, though I do not know why. I think I should not enquire too
closely.
To my mind,
such manifestations as Adamski's Orthon the Venusian and the para-apes are
neither real nor false things; these old industrial distinctions are
useless for a media and web age. We really musr replace the false and the
true by sets of gaming options. Orthon and the par-apes are such options.
They are just a few of the countless forms that always prowl around the
camp-fire of central consciousness. They are neither real nor unreal, but
exist within a scale of allowances. We experience what we allow to happen.
Such options are the very stuff of time itself: without them we could not
change, go on to the next bend in the cultural river. In other words the
para-apes and Orthon are parts of shadow-games we keep in reserve, games
we are all secretly rehearsing. If we wish, they will readily assume the
appearance of fact and solidity, and may the gods help us if we make the
wrong choice, give the wrong permission. for there are many forms waiting
in the wings infinitely more harmful than Orthon or the para-apes. 