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Hog Productions
CyberHog Unlimited & Network Combat Diaries Present
The Alternative Fortean Times
(beware of imitations)
http://www.combat-diaries.co.uk
Panzerben's Combat Diary 21 for August/September 2004 Webmaster Stephen Peverley. steve@kingston-design.fsnet co.uk
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Senior members of Panzerben’s Company Board on a recruiting campaign in Notting Hill London, July 2004
Contents of current Combat Diary 21 for August 2004
Press Chapters for access
Chapter 1: The Dream Life of Prototypes Part 2 Colin Bennett Chapter 2: Attack on the Pentagon David von Kleist Chapter 3: An Ethnic Bomb Gordon Thomas Chapter 4: An English Book of the Dead Bennett/Baxter Chapter 5: Sarfatti’s Illuminati Jack Sarfatti Chapter 6: Roswell Timeline Tom Carey Chapter 7: CIA and UFOs 1947-1990 Gerald K. Haines Chapter 8: A Rape in Cyberspace Rainbow Gyrl Chapter 9: UFO Roundup Volume 9 Number 29 Joseph Trainor Chapter 10: BUFORA Reports John Rimmer
Catalogue!
Press Chapters for access
Contents
Editor Panzerben briefs his assault squad prior to yet another raid on the Skeptical HQ in Brentford Leisure Centre, the lair of the Brentford Polonius, the Lenin of the Pelicans.
Warning: Statement of Editorial Policy
Now all straight factual goody two-shoes beware: in case of any misunderstanding, may we first add a Combat Viewer Consumer Warning. We have to say that this Combat Product contains impurities numberless, and it is consumed at a Viewer’s own risk. This product is hopelessly contaminated. As such, there is no fair play, democracy, political correctness, and certainly no blessed objective balance in Panzerben's Combat Diaries. Now having clasped that oxygen mask thankfully to your profoundly grateful 21st century head, breathe deep, and prepare for rescue from those who are after the arse of your fertile imagination. And remember that Panzerben's Combat Diaries are not here to educate, inform or convert you. Their sole object is to offer the greatest intellectual sex you have ever experienced. If you want to scream and scream again brother and sister bears, this is the place to do it, and don’t let the skeptics tell you there ‘ain’t no Santa Claus, aliens, and nothing behind the veil of the temple, or even hovering over Batley Boiler House for that matter. Treasure your fantasies, your illusions, your self-deceptions, hopeless desires, ridiculous thoughts, precious silliness, your dreams, and all your nonsense, because without them you are under control. And you would not want that to happen, would you? Because once the system has got under control, you are dead, brothers and sisters. George Mensche, our Roving Reporter of the Combat Diaries now wishes to give all Viewers a special Combat Mantra by means of which psychic protection can be secured. It is:
All Matter is Pure Plot
Now forget poor Jesus and Allah-what’s-his-name, forget Isaac Newton and Michael Jackson. These are all versions of the same thing. Remember this mantra and chant it out aloud when the images come to arrest you and change your circuitry. Chant it to your loves and your cancers, sing it to your inspirations and your madness and your dreams and your failures and your disappointments. It will cure warts, the palsy, and even prevent the mental form of Montezuma’s revenge. This form of Combat Healing will protect you also from another twenty five years of British Arts, Media, and Entertainment, no less. And that’s worth a prayer or two, believe you me. This Combat Mantra is the holiest thing in the universe. Why? Because it is an OFF switch. And things don’t come more holy than that.
But now to secular matters.
Fortean Politics in Action
The sight of the fussing housewives and the fretting queens at both the Fortean Times (our sister paper) and Magonia Magazine picking up their skirts and complaining about the Combat Diaries is a great source of pleasure, amusement and inspiration to us all at the House of Panzerben. This is what fortean “politics of the imagination” is all about. They are chasing their sceptical tails wondering about whether the Alternative Fortean Times is “real” or not. The blissful outrage and the erotic threat of legal action from this quarter keeps us well supplied with intellectual sex of the very best quality. This situation shows how little any of them know about the anarchist ideas (wat dem? –ed) of Charles Fort. These people have done tremendous damage to all New Age and Alternative belief systems and to complain now that there is rising opposition in town is a irony Charles Fort himself would have relished.
The set of somewhat smaller village sewing circles of the Magonian sceptical group are so worried about the “reality” of the Combat Diaries that they have devoted almost the entire issue of Magonia Magazine 85 to demonstrating the “unreality” of the situations and characters of the Combat Diaries. Shock and Horror! One wonders if they would go into the same petite-bourgeois tizzy over Bill and Ben the Flower Pot Men.
And these people have the cheek to call themselves “forteans!”
PanzerBen Attacked!
For some time our many covert friends and sympathisers have leaked information to us that the Brentford Polonius, guru supreme of the Sceptical Headquarters at Brentford Leisure Centre, has been planning such an attack on the True Believers House of Panzerben. Since his brood of deeply depressed accountants, retired schoolteachers, and coughing anorak stamp-collectors, have the brains of town councillors and the sense of wonder of toilets for the disabled, we remain somewhat unafraid of these small-time small-town chapel-pelicans, implicit representatives of that religion which came from King Henry’s codpiece.
As Patricia Farson has said, if they get yet more Protestant they will be able to obtain permission from Lambeth Palace to wear surplices and to dish out marriage, death, and birth certificates.
With these thoughts in mind, I go out for a sausage sandwich in the last non-Allah greasy spoon in the Portobello. In an absent minded moment I forgot to take my minder (a hog-chested black geezer who gave up Jesus for money), and I am of course attacked by a cave-woman on crack, who wants to remove my face with a broken bottle. I resist the thought that she might be from the Fortean Times, but I suppose that she was far too bizarre and weird to be from that direction.
In comparison with this experience, the arrival of Magonian Magazine 85 was like being savaged by a dead sheep. On a brief look I did notice that the writer of the article “The New Cromwellians?,” a certain Mr. P.L. Frankson, has made a terrible mistake. The phrase “The New Cromwellians” was coined by Patricia Farson and was first used as the title of an article in Combat Diary 12, Chapter 4, for July/August 2003. The term “Cromwellians” was used by Patricia as a description of the editorial staff and many contributors of the Fortean Times, not the staff of the Combat Diaries! From the very beginning therefore, Mr. Frankson has the whole business wrapped around his neck. Also, through lack of editorial concentration on the setting on the front cover, it looks as if the “Magonians” as well as the “Cromwellians” are attacking the Fortean Times! We have therefore decided to refer to Mr. Frankson’s article by its sub title “From Intellectual Sex, Good Lord Protect Us!” in order to avoid confusion.
First, Mr. Frankson describes Patricia Farson as my “alter ego.” Really, the use of such ancient Freudian night-school terms when discussing a Balliol Eng. Lit. man such as myself is bad form. We judge by style at the Combat Diaries, and frown upon the use of obsolete left-wing terms last heard in the ruinous Polytechnics, where the “factual researchers” of yesteryear held their fish and chip shop statistical discussions, took notes about the (rapidly disappearing) “working class” and equated them and their doings to “concrete reality.”
In fairness, we do accept that British sceptical culture headed by the staid and extremely conservative Fortean Times/Magonia Magazine sceptical group would be deeply disturbed by all things even slightly mad, fantastic, weird, bizarre, abstract, or positively surreal as represented by the Combat Diaries, which in one year of rapid progress has become what one leading writer called “one of the leading anarcho-situationist (wat dat? –ed) sites of the world.” In Britain we all live in the last remaining world power that does not have a Revolutionary constitution. As such abstract art, experimentation of all kinds, all metaphysical/intellectual matters, the study of paranormal effects and fortean anomalies give the sainted British brain grave difficulties. I can see easily that the rather faded Fortean Times/Magonia Magazine sceptical group as representatives of Straight England would be deeply alarmed and offended by the Combat Diaries of the Alternative Fortean Times.
As the officially rated figures above show, the Combat Diaries is now running at a thousand hits per day and rising by some 10% per month. We are now overwhelmed by enquiries about representation from writers and publishers of all kinds. This current Diary 21 has been expanded to include many of these areas of interest. We have even included an article by the Brentford Polonius himself in this issue! We have been offered money as support but that is a very different ball game. We don’t want to finish up a piece of corporate plastic like the Fortean Times.
We get at least a 50-100 emails per day, and most of them thank us for blowing the cover off the devious and conspiratorial Fortean Times/Magonia Magazine sceptical axis. Some gluttons for punishment even congratulate us and wish us well, and quite a few (including internationally famous figures) now regard the Combat Diaries as one of the first “masterpieces of cyberspace” (who? –ed). Others accuse us of cruelty, libel, sadism, scandal, sexism, and even neo-fascism, an impure cocktail which pleases us greatly. We specialise in such impurities. We breed, manufacture, and distribute such on a world-wide basis as indicated by one of the Combat Diaries brand names, “intellectual sex” (copyright, please). The “noise” in a system is the only holy part of any system, it is the rainforest, and we wish to preserve such noise in the manner of protecting what Charles Fort might have called an ecology of inspirations, just like the makers of corn-circles and the indeed the manufacturers of the MJ12 papers. May the gods forbid the time when accusations come of us being full of factual common sense and sensible English thoughts found in the pages of the politically-correct Fortean Times, or little magazines such as Magonia Magazine, whose Anglican anus is as clean as Carol Vorderman’s kitchen top.
Far worse accusations than wanking are levelled against us. We are accused of being literary/intellectual/artistic (would you believe) which appears to be a form of mental illness to the provincial washerwomen of Magonian Brentford. Certainly such south of Calais things as literary/intellectual/artistic matters are guaranteed to arouse the kind of native Home Counties bafflement and anger represented by Mr. Frankson’s article. He reacts to such things as he would react to an invasion of Jews, Blacks, or (worse) Frenchmen, Germans, or (much worse) indeed the extraterrestrial aliens that Magonians love to hate, even though they say they do not exist.
As a final word, I would like to say accusations of madness from this pile of hoary old fruitcakes dragged up by the Brentford Polonius is pretty rich. With the exception of Tonto (who is a young fogie as distinct from an old one), each village beadle assembled in issue 85 of Magonian Magazine is as batty as anything to be found in the Combat Diaries.
I have decided to ask Patricia Farson (She Who Does Not Exist), our Features Editor, to review fully Mr. Frankson’s article “From Intellectual Sex, Good Lord Protect Us!” and below is her flying scroll of revelation concerning the Brentford Polonius (John Rimmer, editor of Magonia Magazine) and the Fried Slice (present editor of the Fortean Times - I can never remember his name, never mind his fortean track record). Both may take comfort from their new-found fame, because one thing is certain: you are nobody until you are given a name by the Combat Diaries. When you are given an implant codename by us, you have arrived. The Brentford Polonius, Prod, and Tonto know the feeling. We can now add the Fried Slice and the Strutting Tuffty to this galaxy, and this troupe will remembered by world history, as our search engines and meta tags are at this very moment spreading their names and new-found fame beyond Mars and back. They may well rejoice, for these names will be pondered upon as we now gaze upon mysterious scrawls in ruined Mayan temples and graffiti on the forlorn doors of Brentford Leisure Centre. But let them all rejoice again, for they have been given post-nuclear immortality by the apocalyptic Combat Diaries of the Alternative Fortean Times. Hellelujah!
The Leader
Part 3
Patricia Farson, Features Editor, the Alternative Fortean Times
(ed – throughout the following, BP refers to the Brentford Polonius, editor of Magonia Magazine, published by Sceptical Headquarters, Brentford Leisure Centre. The nom de guerre “Fried Slice” refers to the current Editor of the Fortean Times)
Dearly Beloved, Since neither the Brentford Polonius nor the Fried Slice believe in my existence, I have decided to review the article “From Intellectual Sex, Good Lord Protect Us!” written by one P.L. Frankson, a mute inglorious Milton if ever there was. Disappointing, BP. Do us all a favour – can’t you find yourself some talent somewhere? Even the poor Fried Slice bless him writes better than this. Poor Frankson’s literary light is as dim as the proverbial Toc H lamp.
Honestly folks, with heavily sedated opposition like this, we should worry?
BP, next time yo u want do a put-down of the Combat Diaries, either do it yourself, or indeed either hire ourselves (we write brilliant put-downs of our absolutely ridiculous selves, but only for money). Please, do not choose some washed-up clapped-out messmates of the month, like the crowd you gathered to make nasty comments about The Leader. These actors are almost entirely unknown to the outer world, their scripts are dull and laboured, and have the wit of a thrown dustbin. They read like old Baptist tracts or communist leaflets and the “truth” is revealed as always hard and painful as “fantasies” and “illusions” are destroyed like confessions of mortal sin. Manic scepticism of the Magonian brand is “holy roller” religion in another form, and bits of it are straight out of Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible. These people are apparatchiks of a fallen old “world order” that still possessed Christ and Steam, books from Boots, and contraceptives as thick as the top sails of a 48-gun Man o’ War, and tighter than a kettledrum at an oratorio. As such, most British and American scepticism smacks of the remnants of Weslyan communism of the old Tractarian Societies and the early co-operative movements.
Really, BP, what an impressive set of old time Lutheran actors you have here assembled!
Mr Frankson’s script should be exhibited in the Victoria and Albert, along with Paul Sieveking (The Big Girl’s Anorak), who called Bennett as “bufoon.” Sieveking was always the brain-dead sleeping partner of the original Fortean Times editor duo. Zombie-like, he is a dismal mediocrity and an ill-natured pompous bore of well nigh universal reputation. In over twenty years no less, he can claim very few words indeed published between two staples, and none at all between hard or soft covers. When he finally reached folded covers at least, his embarrassing so-called “fortean” contributions to the Sunday Telegraph were so lacklustre that he didn’t last long. He couldn’t even manage a decent paragraph, never mind a thought, even less an inspiration. The mental level of his fortean horizon is positively Victorian. As a performer, he sees forteana as a collection of dead obscure oddities, equivalent to stamp collections or railway number spotting. Definitely not someone to spring out of a cake at a party. Not even his failure is monumental. We are now moving on from Prod and Tonto to a new cyber-soap, The Journal of Paul Sieveking. Melody Barton has joined us to write this monthly account of an 18thth century country gentleman in a salute to Laurence Sterne’s novel, Tristram Shandy.
Like the hell-raising Bennett or not, the general consensus is that he is star quality. We ourselves never know what he is going to do next. Already he has built a unique web site of world-wide renown, and has a new book coming out that will introduce New Ufology to the world. Many agree that Bennett is changing the rules, exploring the literary, intellectual, and artistic possibilities of cyberspace, pushing the frontiers of the form.
Bennett’s books are reviewed all over the world. We get mail every day praising them. His book Politics of the Imagination on Charles Fort won the Anomalist Best Biography Award for 2002, and Looking for Orthon is now a cult classic. The sceptical gadflies of Magonia Magazine are not in the same league. None of their books has won a prize for anything at all, and this may be the Freudian part of their antagonism.
The abrasive Bennett is difficult, complex, ruthless, nasty, but impossibly brilliant. His IQ if right off the scale and still moving. Though he offends and hurts people but that is often the way such people are, and we protect him. We are a raffish techno-artistic crowd here. We live for the most part by our wits, and only Bennett’s type survives. There are fights and rows every day that would chill the placard-squeaks of the straw-behind-the-ears Brentford villagers, and there are no apologies and no quarter given. If the quaint Mr. Frankson thinks he worries us amidst the raw scenes we have here, the poor devil had better think again. We’ve got a brothel one side of us, a crack-cocaine house on the other side, and every second house in the district appear to catch fire on the stroke of every second hour. If any leafy types want to come for a white-knuckle holiday, they are very welcome. Here, facts and fictions change place in the twenty minutes between police sirens, and that’s on a good day.
As regards Prod, all I will say is that he is straight out of a Carry On film. But actually, his comic “I am a not-too-bright uneducated northern working-class yob” act is as phoney as silicon tits. This transformation must have cost him a great of money. Street-wise personality kits don’t come cheap. Therefore I don’t believe any of his “I am just a plain honest stick-of-Blackpool-rock” talk for a minute. Bennett says he is as phoney as Wigan Pier, or George Formby’s banjo (which he never actually played). I agree that nobody could possibly be like this in 2004. He is as anachronistic as Arthur Scargill, Harry Lauder’s walking stick, or Joanna Southcote’s Box of Revelations. His act needs updating. He should get another agent, regain his original posh vowels, and go and live in Cheltenham (which is probably where he came from). There his controllers can reprogramme him and turn him back again to his posh origins which he is trying to conceal. We have tried for some time to find his John Pilger no-nonsense left-wing style “objective factual research” but so far nothing has turned up except culture and personality. Prod should phone me sometime and we’ll swap masks. I went upstream, he went downstream. I am a wacky American joke, he is a oafish British one. If Prod is not careful he will finish up as a British institution, like chip butties, the Albert Memorial, or Radio Four. Thus all we have with Prod is not his beloved “facts” but time, culture, and personality connected by image, symbol, and metaphor. This is a compliment to him, because some people have no personality even less culture, and no image at all. As a personality Prod dwarfs all the other old boiler acts on the Magonia list. This the only area in which he equals Bennett, and the only thing they have in common. Since only personality ever matters, I suppose this makes them equals in one respect at least, although don’t tell Bennett that!
I can’t really comment on Paul Devereaux as a performer. I had not heard of this person prior to the Magonia 85 article. Apparently he is a yet another leafy man from far away who writes windy scripts about rock carvings, and thinks UFOs are luminous electrical effects caused by changing geo-magnetic strains within the earth. Tough titty! I am told on good authority that he is violently anti-American in the bargain, and his comic pomposity is only rivalled by that of the “strutting tuffty” Paul Sieveking. As an act, he desperately needs someone to write some new material. This kind of tat ruined the Halls.
Another delightful Edwardian actor contributing to the “get Bennett” team is one Peter Brookesmith. His claim to be qualified to judge the Combat Diaries is that he is a horse breeder, no less, by Jove! While I can see that such a qualification might well serve to describe ourselves on many an occasion, more disturbing is that he calls himself the Duke of Mendoza. In their favour, I do notice that this Devereaux and Brookesmith have had at least the wit not to take the Combat Diaries as seriously as the lesser mortals present have done. Brookesmith even makes a comparison between Bennett and the late Gordon Creighton (RIP, the former editor of the Flying Saucer Review). Bennett regards this to be a compliment, not an insult. Creighton bless his bones, was a scholar and a gentleman and a renowned figure of world ufology. But who would call himself the Duke of Mendoza, for goodness sake? Anyone calling himself such must be either a complete idiot, or is a Combat Diaries wannabee. Unless it is true, that is. In which case I apologise, and thank the gods that we have a member of the aristocracy amongst us as distinct from meritocrats from unknown provincial universities. The trouble is that http://users.swing.be/sw239020/sangre/infantado.doc reports that the last of the Mendoza family line, the 19th Duke, Inigo de Arteaga, died in 1941. I can also report that one of the books of the “researchers” mentioned on this list was based completely on the purchased records of a quite a different person.
As a performer, Tonto continues to write safe, sensible, and worthy scripts full of good common-sense and “factual research.” These tomes are worthy of sixth-form prizes, scout badges, committee commendations and a proud and pleased mum and dad. May the gods save us all from such a fate as this. However if he reads more widely and improves his concentration and intellectual grasp (and listens to Bennett) he may well write something of significance. Sensitive, mature, and intelligent, but don’t phone us Tonto, we’ll phone you. He would not have done well at the second house Glasgow Empire on a Saturday night.
Yes, I must admit BP, you are a true connoisseur. As a collector of English pre-electric chapel bumpkins from nowhere you are unsurpassed. Is the bewildered and eccentric Frankson the kind of face from the dotty provincial twilight you live in? BP, you really must get rid of the defrocked bell-ringers you surround yourself with. Use pros for Christ’s sake, and not some ancient creaking chapel-caretaker you have dragged from his death bed in some whited tin sepulchre down memory lane. But on the other hand, you could make a lot of money selling such collections of Old Queen Sceptical Gargoyles to the States or somewhere. They could be exhibited with Ena Sharples or Cliff Richard of the same era and the same brain region. You could call your show Cliques of Little England or something like that. Americans would love it. Be a lot more interesting than Sherlock Holmes, Ye Olde Nell Gwynn, or the manufactured consumer-weirdness of the Fortean Times.
And BP, you’ll have to improve your setting and layout, which frankly, is lousy. It looks as if your paste-up has been done with penknife. It reminds me of East German wallpaper before just before Rudolf Hess was bumped off to tidy up the maps. And please, BP, get a new high-resolution scanner. The photographs of myself and Bennett makes us look as if we’ve just come out of Brixton rehab and detox. And for goodness sake can we have something like a Sceptical Reader’s Wife colour centrefold? It would make a nice change instead of depressing suicidal articles out to prove that the world is a stable and mundane place fit for respectable lower middle class minds to live in. The Salvation Army could raise a better laugh than your dull little journal.
But in your favour BP, I will say that at least you have the courage of your convictions. You admit that you are a sceptic and deny that there is anything at all remarkable under the sun and moon. This is much more honest than the Fortean Times which under its present editorship does not know whether it is on its arse or its elbow. The lurid UFOs on the cover will lure you inside the magazine, only to have the democratically appointed anti-UFO UFO columnists tell readers that UFOs do not exist!
Yes BP, you really are a sucker for the grey hordes of the rapidly aging lower-middle class. They flock to you like homesick hall porters, possibly for psychological reassurance that Mind and the World are still as solid as they were in pre-steam England. You must have done something desperately normal and conventional in another life as well as this present one to deserve this fate. But this boot-and-braces “common British sense” sceptical rationalism makes your writers sound like depressed Morris dancers. One notes that as with all cloggies, the prime consideration is whether the characters in the Combat Diaries are “real” or not. Do they think the Royal Family, the TV News, or Michael Jackson are “real?” Is paper money, the world’s only ufological stage-Yorkshireman or the Duke of Mendoza title “real?” |
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really must include here the photograph of the said Mr Frankson in Magonia
Magazine 85. He looks like a pre-Raphaelite nut in a kilt, posing for
Dante Gabriele Rossetti round about 1858. Apparently he lives on the
southern slopes of the