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Book Reviews
Blueprints of the Possible
MJ-12 and the Riddle of Hangar 18 by Timothy Green Beckley with Sean Casteel. Subterranean Worlds Inside Earth by Timothy Green Beckley. UFOs, Prophecy and the End if Time by Sean Casteel. All three of these books are published by Inner Light/Global Communications Box 753, New Brunswick, NJ 08903. They are available also from Gazelle Book Services, Amazon, or from the site http://www.conspiracyjournal.com. These three books represent a powerful and extremely well written collection of the most significant lost wiring and short-circuits of our time. Many of the tales they tell have been told before, some of them for well nigh nearly half a century, in a considerable number of books. But almost all of such books are now out of date or difficult to find. But in these new editions, the writers have brought the stories up to date with new information, and these large format books are good primers for a new young generation. Any serious investigator of almost anything within the past 100 years, whether investigating the most simple innocent things or the labyrinth of the military-industrial-complex, comes across pretty much the same effect: a wiring tangle which goes anyway which way. This tangle is a kind of benchmark of cultural time. The end-stopped finite “solutions” of Agatha Christie’s detective stories are as inadequate as pre-Einsteinian physics to describe our world. Future researchers will see the transfer from mechanical certainty to a kind of multi-cellular cosmos, a media gaming situation that has largely replaced the old mechanical-industrial world. Such researchers, whilst working through the irradiated strata of our dust, will see there the difference between the 19th and the twentieth centuries. They will ponder on the sudden visible break between mechanical certainty and the onset of bewilderment as the mind leaves a cosmos where inputs equal outputs, for a universe where image-structures dominate, and these equations no longer apply. Franz Kafka and T.S. Eliot were the first writers to portray a vision of what is now referred to as the disintegrated cosmos. Nothing shows more this bewildering uncertainty and chaotic structure than the world of Ufology, a culture that is a true reflection of our all our doubts, confusions and uncertainties. These three books from Casteel and Beckley reflect this inspiring mess, and their writing is of extremely high quality. Both writers show Ufology to be a magic mirror world of changing exits and entrances and enigmatic arrivals and departures as we read chapters with titles such as The Los Alamos Saucer and the U.S. Government, Crashed Saucers and Alien Beings, Occupants Repair Disabled Craft, Hangar 18 and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and The Night A UFO Came Crashing Down Over Ohio. MJ-12 and the Riddle of Hangar 18 is also a very good overview and introduction to one of the most fascinating questions of our time: the MJ-12 papers. These papers are a collection of reports from various times and places, and they indicate that alien bodies (both dead and alive) and also alien flying craft have been recovered by various government agencies in the United States. Of course, the accusation has been made that these papers are forgeries. If they are, then they are truly masterpieces of the forger’s art: a forger would have to know papers, inks, manual typefaces, typewriter characteristics, and the manifold nomenclature and minutia of changing government and military office procedures over nearly a half-century in order to fool every single one of the top authorities in the U.S.A. who have examined these documents, many of which are reproduced MJ-12 and the Riddle of Hangar 18, with acknowledgments to such researchers as the Woods and Stanton Friedman.
In MJ-12 and the Riddle of Hangar 1, parts of the cosmic wiring can still be seen, be it uncertain in its workings, disconnected, or belonging to routes that go under the hill of dreams. But UFOs, Prophecy and the End of Time and Subterranean Worlds Inside Earth describe a situation conceivably in advance of MJ-12 and the Riddle of Hangar 1. In these two books, there is hardly any wiring at all, just blue prints, design-suggestion, experimental sketches of possible wiring looms and harnesses, and suggestions for further pathways and routes of investigation and experience. We hear of Good and Evil Among the Abductees, Dr. R. Leo Sprinkle and Benevolent Aliens, and in contrast, the uncertain nature of aliens as described by Whitely Streiber; we hear of the mystical insights of Dr. Turi, the future apocalyptic prophecies of Judith Bluestone Polich, and the mysticism of Dr. Joe Lewels. All these possible, would-be and theoretical connections have spiritual, moral, and mystical implications, and the fascinating thing again about all three of these books from Beckley and Casteel is that such things are seen against the scenarios of the supposedly “mechanically objective” Military-Industrial Complex, which is of course as much a cosmos to ourselves as were the orders of angels to the mediaeval world. What these books do politically is tear the mask off the preposterous pose of “objectivity” of indeed any cosmos, and especially the Military-Industrial one. They lift up the stone and we see what countless things, terrified by the collapsed roof of their firmament, try to burrow deeper in an attempt to escape the light. In being blueprints, these things are images. Being images they are virtual things, the very stuff of which the postmodern world is made. The visions of the blessed Ray Palmer and the blessed Richard Shaver as described by Timothy Beckley in Subterranean Worlds Inside Earth have become litanies within modern techno-tribal rituals. The Chapter titles alone (Underground Cities, The Shaver Mystery, Cavern Monsters, The Little People, Atlanteans from the Inner Earth) are sufficient to rouse a sense of wonder in even walking-wounded amongst us, and lead all dead souls to wonder and innocence again. Also they restore faith in any child of nature who has managed to escape from that nightmare of skeptical rationalism that keeps all scared of believing for a minute that such inner-Earth adventures of the super-fictions of virtuality can enter our lives off the page in a grey-scale of form, from mere wraiths to the almost-solid. In these three books we see the transfer from molecules and atoms to virtual structures of rumour, image, metaphor and staging. We can drive to infinity along these routes with Beckley and Casteel, something we could never ever do with atoms or molecules. They cut us out of the picture, made us existential prisoners, but now hopefully, through such books as these we can move again. Bless you, Beckley and Casteel for denying time and bring these banned new old stories once more to a youth of a new generation. They stink of sulphur, and that’s better than the no-smell of TV catsup, the stench of skeptical despair and depression, and the dismal provincial visions of dog-brained scientific policemen. These are Charles Fort’s “damned” texts of our time; as Resistance they will be read in secret like codes from the intellectual maquis in the far forests. They are read in locked bathrooms, under sheets by torchlight, in darkened car parks, anywhere the wide-screen Nikon can’t find them.
Long live the Pirate Texts! Colin Bennett
Doing Business In The Adirondacks by Eugenia Macer-Story Yankee Oracle Press 511 Avenue of the Americas - PMB 173 New York, N.Y. 10011-8436 USA info@yankeeoracle.org ISBN 1-879980-16-9
Another Pirate Text
The old fun-fairs used to have something called the Ghost Train in which track-switching dodgem cars travelling in a complete darkness illuminated by sudden encounters with glowing skulls, witches in Gothic alcoves, and twitching corpses in vaulted tombs. Eugenia Macer-Story replaces this ancient corny apparatus by much cooler mind-states, but the dramatic effect is still much the same: turn a page, and you do not know what is going to come at you from out of the dark. It is done almost stream-of-consciousness style, and after James Joyce, such novels did not generate a good reputation. Ulysses, it seemed was a one-off experiment that though quite revolutionary, could never be repeated. Doing Business In The Adirondacks is brilliantly done, extremely well-written and the author manages to keep the colours, settings, and atmospheres from all flowing into one another and becoming yet another stream-of consciousness mess. The “I” of the narrative lives in the smashed telephone exchanges that represent the consciousness of our time. She gets up in the morning, and starts the day like a time-traveller returning to a wrecked planet she once called home. Here is a piece of conscious recall that still works, there a piece that dies in her hands, here are pieces of mechanistic consciousness that require spare parts, are ill-maintained, obsolete, or are design failures. Instead of here be dragons, it could be said that in the maps of her mind here be prototypes, conspiracies of mind-states, trips and technologies. Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is the obvious influence, but nevertheless, the book stands by itself as a visionary text of our time.
If the novel has a landscape it is the landscape of no less than fifty years of alternative New Age culture, from Nazis occultism to UFO contactee-culture, from techno-cults to Virtualism. It can be safely put on a shelf alongside Paowel and Bergier’s Morning of the Magicians, and that is praise enough.
Colin Bennett REVIEW: Politics of the Imagination: The Life, Work and Ideas of Charles Fort by Colin Bennett Published by Headpress / Critical Vision – £12.99 / $17. 95 - ISBN 1900 4862 02
Book Review by Andrew Darlington published in “Busswarble” (Australia) and adapted for publication in “Chaotic Order” (UK) and “This Way Up” (UK)
Poetic and Difficult
In 1951 John Wyndham wrote a short story referring to “a fellow called Fort who was the arch collector of the improbable.” Jimmy, his character from “Pawley’s Peepholes” (“Science Fantasy no. 3”) “revered this Fort as the savant of the era.” Other, less generous writers have called that same Fort a crank. Or the world’s first UFO-ologist, Damon Knight, calls him “The Prophet of the Unexplained,” while to Frederick Clouser he is the “Apostle of the Impossible.” Nevertheless, Wyndham’s Jimmy explains, “… this Fort guy’s method was to labour mightily with scissors and paste, present the resulting collation, and leave it to a largely indifferent world to judge whether nearly everybody wasn’t wrong about everything.” Colin Bennett, and John Keel who contributes a well-informed Foreword, are far from indifferent about that legacy, and are more than convinced that Fort was on to something.
In fact the real-life Charles Hoy Fort (1874 to 1932), after a failed attempt at writing novels, spent twenty-six years – the best part of half his lifetime researching and cut-&-pasting old stories from newspapers, technical magazines and specialist journals from the New York Public Library to the British Museum. He amassed some 40,000 clippings in the process, divided into 1,300 sections written in pencil on minute scraps of paper in a stenographic language of his own invention. An archive documenting such meteorological, astronomical, human and animal phenomena as lost planets, Flat-Earthism, lights in the sky, spontaneous human combustion, coloured rain, falls of frogs, teleportation, sea serpents, vanishing ships, vanishing people, poltergeists and much, much more (just as the “Fortean Times” continues to do today – in his name). From this huge miscellanea Fort compiled just four data-crammed books of apparently unrelated yet obsessively documented ideas – “The Book Of The Damned” (1919), “New Lands” (1923), “Lo” (1931), and his take on ESP potential in “Wild Talent” (1932), each of them largely arranged in a Ripley’s “Believe It Or Not”-style. But to Colin Bennett, in his authoritative overview, the iconoclastic Charles Fort is more than just an endearing and occasionally provocative eccentric. He’s a man boldly margin-walking the periphery of the known, gnawing at the interface into inexplicable otherness, opening up the “cracks and fissures in the mundane world.”
But to me it seems obvious that the logical analytical scientific progress has taken us higher and further in two short centuries than the irrational-superstitious intuitive-religious impulses took us over the previous dark ten thousand. We live longer and healthier, travel faster, use neural cyber-systems that interconnect the planet into a single electro-organism – produce books like Politics of the Imagination. All this, through science, allied to technology. But science is procedure based on methodical investigation, tested through meticulous replication, developed, modified or rejected through the accumulation of additional evidence. It is not a faith. Sure, the “disinterested objectivity” of science is compromised by – and subject to – market interests, corporate investment, military-industrial sponsorship – a tool of globalisation and probable instigator of eco-catastrophe, while rigidly enforcing its own orthodoxy against inconveniently non-conforming ideas. But to reject it is to deny our species’ greatest adventure. This book points out that “Fort warns us that the idea of ‘fact’ itself is a late and rather callow arrival on the historical scene”, and that “the factual is a limiting psychological device.” And if the theoretical edge of science occasionally seems to be advancing into the “Alice In Wonderland” conundrums of Black hole physics, the Heisenburg dance of sub-atomic particles, and the post Big-Bang nano-seconds of Super String theory where all reason appears to break down into quantum absurdity – well, perhaps there are limits. As the moralist warns the Movie “Mad Scientist”, there may well be areas where science can’t go. Perhaps, despite the best applications of research-and-development we’ll never accelerate Captain Kirk-style beyond light speed? Or find a cure for HIV. Or perhaps we will. That’s what’s cool about science too. It offers us the potential to evolve. What Byrd Roger McGuinn derides as this “scientific delirium madness” has got us this far. That’s no small achievement. Meanwhile, Charles Fort’s “Lo” got itself experimentally serialised in eight parts – from April to November 1934 in Astounding Stories edited by John W. Campbell Jnr. From there the ideas were swiftly assimilated and creatively pilfered by Sci-Fi writers – Damon Knight, Edmond Hamilton, Eric Frank Russell’s “Sinister Barrier” (drawing on Fort’s “we are property idea of Earth as an “asylum world” for galactic delinquents), and at least one John Wyndham short story. Unfortunately it also became first-base for more commercially astute wilful absurdists such as Eric Van Daniken and an entire flotilla of New Age Mystics, phoney mediums and neon anti-rationalist Life-Style Gurus. Colin Bennett’s valuable and well-written Politics of the Imagination performs the vital service of rescuing what is worthy about Charles Fort, circumventing all the nonsense-accumulation about him and taking his work back to its origins for reappraisal. Bennett asks that we should feel free to question science, point out its contradictions, its inadequacies, its nagging “X-Files” inconsistencies that don’t quite fit and are consequently airbrushed out.
But then perhaps the need for airbrushing itself should be part of scientific study too, and investigated through scientific processes? Even if Charles Fort, John Wyndham’s “arch-collector of the improbable,” only makes us “realise that despite the protestations of science and all commonsense, we still live in a world of incredible magic,” that’s still a perception well worth making. Andrew Darlington.
Andrew Darlington is the author of I Was Elvis Presley’s Bastard Love Child (Head Press) “Andrew Darlington has been interviewing Rock’s luminaries and legends for several decades - spurred on as a child in the late-sixties by testosterone, the napalm that was Elvis and hopes to bed hippie chicks. I Was Elvis Presley’s Bastard Love Child collects together his timeless and engaging conversations with a diverse selection of artists and band members.”
Letters to the Editor
Is this all real Colin? (John Deacon) Oh yes, it is all real. I have not ever been able to find the unreal. My search for it is never ending. I have a terrible unsatisfied need to disbelieve. The unreal is my personal Grail. I mean what are you trying to do with all this? Is it serious or have you just invented a revolutionary new form of home entertainment? Paul Savage. Entertainment? You call this entertainment? Panzerben, or whatever your silly name is, this is all crap. Your name is Colin Bennett, and you write the very best books in this area, so why don’t you just do that, and stop trying to be funny? Sally. You think the Combat Diaries are funny? These are the confession of my soul, do you mind? Snobby, pretentious, elitist crap. John, London. You disappoint me, John. I thought this was pop culture. It just shows how behind the times I am. Are these characters real, Colin? Philip Maxwell. Write to them and ask them. I’m sure you would get a good reply. Why do you hate certain people? Why do you try and attack and destroy so much? Margaret. Hate doesn’t come into it. I use satire in defence of New Age Culture against those who would seek to destroy it using the cover of anodyne Forteanism. Anyone who wants to help me in this respect, knows where I am. Believe me if the skeptics have their way, it will be back to 1950s Britain and a culture which is not worth a spew in Woolworth’s doorway. Received from Jim H.
Dear
Colin,
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