Spooky Paradigm

Weird Archaeology 101: Dowsing for Graves

2012-01-10T16:37:00.003-06:00

This is a cross-post from my largely moribund archaeology blog "In Strange Things Found." I have never really mastered the art of blogging about "normal," because it was always either just recounting some news story, or if it was professionally related to my work, I'd not feel comfortable writing about it at the level of a blog (not so much prestige, but more the need for care, which if I'm doing that, would be more usefully spent elsewhere).

Anyway.

I've heard in the past of dowsers or other "psychic archaeologists" being used by institutions that didn't want to pay for the more expensive scientific archaeology required to protect cultural patrimony and heritage. But I've never heard of dowsers being brought in because archaeologists weren't considered sufficient enough.

Until now. Check out these links. (h/t Boing Boing)

Buried Secrets

A Grave Matter

I could try to summarize the story, but really I think one needs to read it to really get all the forces at play. Note: While one of the archaeologists involved is from Tulane University, his entry into their program postdates my graduation, I don't know him.

"Finding Bigfoot" ... in 2 1/2 minutes

2012-01-03T19:29:00.003-06:00

So, I can now say I've seen "Finding Bigfoot," thankfully edited down by VoodooSix (or however they spell their name) The section from 1:16-1:32 is completely awesome

Barack Obama of Mars

2012-01-03T15:14:00.002-06:00

Did you know that Barack Obama is actually a secret time and space explorer for DARPA? Apparently the Coast-to-Coast audience has known this since November. How am I only finding out now? I pay more attention to the ridiculousness over in Bigfootery for a couple of months, and this happens.

As a young man in the early 1980s, Obama was part of a secret CIA project to explore Mars. The future president teleported there, along with the future head of Darpa.
That’s the assertion, at least, of a pair of self-proclaimed time-traveling, universe-exploring government agents. Andrew D. Basiago and William Stillings insist that they once served as “chrononauts” at Darpa’s behest, traversing the boundaries of time and space. They swear: A youthful Barack Obama was one of them.

So this is where exopolitics has taken us. Bravo. Just bravo.

Places Where Bigfoot Might be Hiding: The Internet

2011-12-01T16:18:00.004-06:00

Because apparently it is a poorly explored place.

Bigfoot blog finds amazing article on translation of ancient texts discussing 10th century communication between Chinese Imperial scholars and Yeti.

Blog post actually links to the original source

But apparently, this, and the name of the author (Tim Pulju) was not sufficient to show that the source is in fact, a satirical publication, a The Onion for linguistics.

I mean, that would require looking to the fourth-down return if you google "Tim Pulju"

To be fair, many of the comments on that blog post guess that it is likely satire but others suggested it could be a real journal article,or some sort of misunderstanding. While I approve that some were able to recognize the satire, that no one even bothered to take 15 seconds and actually find out, is the real problem. You don't even need to type if that is too much effort, just copy and paste and click.

I have heard professors say they don't like their students to use internet sources for their work. I think this is an excellent example of why they should be using the internet, under the guidance and training of a professional researcher (as any professor is).

In my classes, especially my introductory classes, I have decided to do two things in addition to the standard curriculum of whatever the class is.

1.) If at all applicable, address pseudoscience and mysticism that routinely gets associated with anthropology and archaeology (the subjects I teach). They are so intertwined in the popular imagination, it seems like we have a professional obligation to hit this stuff head-on, not ignore it and hope it goes away. That didn't work for evolutionary biology, it won't work for us.

2.) Have my students use the internet to look things up, especially early on in the class, and to critique how they found information, identify warning signs a site is not reliable, and suggest productive alternative strategies and practices.

Werewolves, "Weird Women," and the Web: How the "Satanic Panic" has never really gone away

2011-11-27T12:16:00.004-06:00

The term Satanic Panic is typically used to refer to a period from perhaps the late 1970s into the early 1990s, when fears (largely derived from a surging literalist evangelical wing of American Christianity) of Satanism exploded into lurid accusations of secret underground Satanic cults, ritual abuse and murder of children (tied into a media obsession missing children that has also never, this is where the "face on a milk carton" trope comes from), and claims of secret Satanic codes in heavy metal music and role playing games (specifically the most popular of them, Dungeons & Dragons).

But you know, it never really ended. It continues to raise its ugly head, often in very similar circumstances. It showed up in the Amanda Knox trial in Italy. The West Memphis Three have only recently been released from prison what have been seen by some as the last major prosecution in the Satanic Panic, but this release of course has its detractors. I mention both of these cases in this post in relation to the counter-terrorism problems at the FBI, also caused by religious or cultural ideologues. There are plenty of others, especially now on an international scale.

And it shows up in full effect here, in the case of the "satanic sex crime gone wrong." At the link (Salon.com) Ritch Duncan discusses how his comedy book The Werewolf's Guide to Life, was found at the scene of, well, maybe a crime (simple summary: guy met up with two girls for sex, some sort of ritual element and knifeplay ensured that apparently got to be too much for the guy, police got involved, guy went home and didn't press charges). Duncan discusses his horror, and then disgust, at how the media exploded and mislead the public about both the case, and arguably about his book (which is an obvious comedy book, I've browsed it in a bookstore, when I was thinking about a similar project involving Lovecraft's creations).

He goes further, and makes an important observation: these media reports didn't do it because they were incompetent or lazy, or least not just for that reason. They did it because they knew it sold to a specific audience. Duncan describes what Glenn Beck did with the story, tying it into vast conspiracy theories of Baal worship and Occupy Wall Street and the Nazis.

Well, yeah. That's the thing with the Satanic Panic, folks. It was always part of a larger ideology, a bigger worldview that was inherently conspiratorial. I've written how a conspiracy theory disguised as scholarship helped inspire both Wicca and H. P. Lovecraft's cosmic horror stories known as the Cthulhu Mythos. Well, it didn't just end there. Margaret Murray argued, incorrectly, that the Satanic witch hunts of the Reformation era were actually a secret pre-Christian religion branded as Satanism. But with the growth and bold assertion of a literalist apocalyptic American Christianity from the 1970s on, this was turned around, and all of it instead seen as really Satanism masquerading under politically correct masks. And tied into other conspiracy theories that are particularly prosperous in the populist right wing, exemplified by Beck's ranting about communist/nazi conspiracies, secret meetings and religions, and global plots against Western civilization (much of which feels lifted from Alex Jones anyway, who has himself flipped around and marched right into the arms of something like Lovecraft's mythos).

It never went anywhere. It just didn't sell broadcast tabloid TV anymore after some of the flashier cases ate up all the oxygen in the room (especially when they fell apart, ala the McMartin case), it was easier to sell stories of aliens in the 1990s (and how that's not that different is a whole other story), and conspiracy theories moved back into the political with the Clinton administration (I'm not saying every witch hunter then went in search of stains on blue dresses or drug planes at Mena airport, as correlation isn't causation, but yeah ;) ). But an audience was always out there, and in internet age of personalized news and entire subcultural media spheres, it can be catered to.

So, when the right "spooky" symbols or associations pop up (creepy books [always available at major book retailers of course. Not, you know, worm-eaten copies of De Vermis Mysteriis], sex rituals, dark outcast teenagers, million-sided dice [or in this case, fantasy monsters]), watch out, here comes the Satanism!

Ghosts In the Museum? Archaeology's Continuing Image Entanglement with the Paranormal

2011-10-21T16:59:00.008-05:00

This weekend, the Penn Museum will be hosting "a once-in-a-lifetime paranormal investigation of the galleries and their ghostly inhabitants" in the event "We See Dead People." (UPDATE: more discussion of the event after the fact, including psychics and ghost hunting equipment, as well as some of the general museum artifacts=paranormal points I make below). It is not surprising that We should not be surprised that a museum or other educational institution would find value in a Halloween-season tie-in, especially as neoliberal ideologies continue to cash-strap such institutions. However, I personally will note some surprise that this goes beyond the typical "let's theme a standard educational presentation with some 'fun' stuff" to being, well, an "actual" paranormal investigation, conducted by Free Spirit Paranormal Investigators. But while surprised, I'm not sure I'm terribly bothered, certainly not to the "Harry Potter shouldn't be filmed in a cathedral level."

There are two issues I want to address here: skeptics vs. pop use of the paranormal, and the image of archaeology and the paranormal.

Skeptical use of the Paranormal

The first issue may put me at odds with some other skeptics, but I'm ok with using the paranormal and fiction to talk about and promote science, scholarship, and learning. And arguably so are most skeptics, even if they don't admit it. If your magazine or website or blog persistently has headlines about Bigfoot, UFOs, ghosts, miracles, and so on, you're utilizing the paranormal to get your point across. And I think a lot of skeptics know this, and know that it is an easy way to get an audience, because for many people this stuff is fun. Critical inquiry of homeopathic medicine, medical claims from manufacturers, or pseudoscience and religion trying to push its foot in the door of public school science teaching is real-world and important stuff. But it can also be cantankerous, and it can have a taste of wonkish policy to it (most important discussions about how we should live or lives probably will).

Let's take a look at a recent issue of Skeptical Inquirer, the table of contents (and some items) available on CSI's website. The cover story is on amnesia, and other articles discuss scientific freedom, the science around causes for cancer, homeopathy, and paleoanthropology. But it also covers religious miracles, psychic powers, alien abduction, numerology, and the dread chupacabra. This is a typical mix for one of the flagships of skepticism, though without going through and counting, I do have a feeling from reading it over the years that paranormal topics have been slightly downgraded in representation, and especially as cover stories. Likewise, one of the most critically-acclaimed skeptical podcasts is Monstertalk, which uses the hook of monsters to talk about real science and history in long-form interviews with real experts on these topics. For example, the Loch Ness Monster becomes an excuse to learn amazing facts about real, and extinct, plesiosaurs (including that the structure of their necks means they could not have resembled reports of Nessie).

Simply put, skeptics have learned that there is real interest in these topics, and that they provide a solid opportunity to talk real science and scholarship (btw, while skeptics almost universally praise Science, I think they might benefit themselves to not forget that there can also be rigorous humanities and social science research, at least rigorous in the same critical evaluation sense. Don't do this, ok?). I'm not saying that's what is going on with Penn's weekend program, I suspect it might not be. But I can imagine a "ghosthunting in a museum" program that could indeed work in that fashion, that would be more of a storytelling experience to present information on some of the exhibits in a more charged and perhaps more intriguing atmosphere. But why in a museum? That leads us to ...

Archaeology's Image and the Paranormal

"Professor of Archeology, expert on the occult, and how does one say it... obtainer of rare antiquities." - initial description of Indiana Jones, Raiders of the Lost Ark

The archaeologist, more than any other real-world scientific character in Western and especially American pop culture, is entangled in the paranormal. At some point, every archaeologist I know has read and laughed at the Onion News article "Archaeologist Tired of Unearthing Unspeakable Ancient Evils." We are routinely the instigators, victims, heroes, or villains of books, films, comic books, television shows, and video games about paranormal activities and phenomena, typically involving ancient curses, resurrected mummies, and sacred objects with mystical powers, but also ranging out to UFOs and mystery animals. In particular, traditional horror stories, in no small part due to the works of M. R. James and H. P. Lovecraft, have the archaeologist or "antiquarian" as a stock character. All of this is just talking about admitted fiction, and doesn't take into consideration the reams of pseudoscience that play on the image of the archaeologist or utilize archaeological imagery (and as a Mesoamericanist, I am particularly cognizant of this due to 2012). A treatment of this topic would need to be at least book-length to do it any justice (and I am indeed working on such a book, dealing with one subset). But we can look at some very basic reasons as to why this is the case, and what archaeologists should do about it.

- Archaeology inherently involves dead people, and westerners (amongst others, but by no means a human universal) find imagery of death spooky and thrilling. An archaeologist will tell you that they study societies that were alive, composed of once living people with agency, no different than ourselves. This is true. At the same time, we dig up graves and tombs, we sift through ruined cities, we examine both discarded trash and ancient heirlooms, and we peer through the years into the past, be it 100 years ago or 100,000 years ago. Our excavations, our training, our museums, our books and articles and presentations, can routinely involve human remains (or imagery thereof), and ancient human remains to boot, with the added distance between death and the present one might find in a ghost story. An archaeologist may be trying to bring the past to life, but they can easily be viewed as examining a world filled with half-open graves (either literally, or metaphorically).

- Archaeological ruins and artifacts, from before the existence of archaeology as a discipline, have long been taken as evidence of the supernatural, and still are. Megalithic sites in Britain almost universally are associated with faerie stories or similar magical legends, and have been for centuries. Europeans interpreted lithic projectile points as "elf shot," faerie arrows shot at people to make them ill. Mayas believed in some cases that archaeological ruins were home to the aluxob, the Central American version of faeries or little people, while in Central Mexico, the ancient metropolis of Teotihuacan was named by later people as "The City of the Gods." Muslim Egyptians referred to the Sphinx as Abu al Hul, "The Terrifying One" or sometimes cited as "The Father of Terror." We might argue that this derives from the fascination with the dead mentioned above, but in a number of cases, that conceptual link doesn't exist. Also, some natural phenomena, such as fossils, were interpreted in a similar fashion. Star-stones, the fossils of sea urchins and similar creatures, are the subject of much folklore as magical items, and have been found in archaeological deposits suggesting that they had this value to some prehistoric people. The basalt Giant's Causeway of Ireland would be another example. I would argue that star stones or basalt formations, like archaeological artifacts, show signs of order not usually found in geological processes, and stood out to pre-scientific observers as potentially of intelligent design, presumably by the supernaturals of creation legends or beings otherwise older than humans.

- Archaeology's nineteenth-century roots lay in three basic traditions: the exploration of the antiquity of humanity; the antiquarian material study of art and architecture of historically-recorded people like the Classical Greeks and Romans; and the exploration of the most highly visible elements of early state-level societies - their monumental works. The first of these traditions seems the one least likely to lead to paranormal entanglements, but even here, the deep time aspect does have mystical overtones for some. The second tradition, of Classical, Biblical, or medieval archaeology, had its doses of myth and legend chasing, most famously that of Heinrich Schliemann's pursuit of the Homeric heroes and their homes. And Classical studies, particularly in the formative years of archaeology, was quite concerned with gods, heroes, and myths. But it is the third strand that is perhaps most to blame. Pyramids, statues, temples, palaces, and tombs were enticing, highly visible, and relatively easy to recognize and understand without knowledge of taphonomy or site-formation processes (or so early archaeologists thought), aspects of the material culture of these early states. And in such early state societies, religion and kingship were routinely blended. Rulers were glorified with myth and legend, and their monuments captioned with magical hieroglyphic writing intended in some respects to be a mystery esoteric but to the few literate, but still on public display to impress the rest. While usually more mundane than depicted in fiction, nonetheless early archaeologists focused on the 1% of society that were considered supernatural, who claimed divine ancestry and the ability to touch the otherworlds. And depicted this legacy in evocative art and iconography. Probably the most influential event in archaeology's public image, the popular and media infatuation with the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb, and media-driven rumors of a curse, is a perfect example of this focus.

- This is compounded by archaeology's and anthropology's colonial legacy, and of particular prurient interest in the "exotic," usually manifesting in archaeology with valued or sacred objects from colonized peoples (or from the ancestors of colonized peoples). In reality, most actual work by archaeologists involves mundane objects, and can in practice be just as likely relatively recent trash from the ancestors of the archaeologist's own society as materials from some far-away "exotic" place. But as with our previous point, the "exotic" was of more interest earlier in the discipline's history, and this informs much of the popular image of archaeology. In fiction, "exotic" cultures and objects, though rarely presented in any sort of accurate or respectful manner, routinely are treated as part of the paranormal or supernatural. The quote earlier in this post, referring to the most famous fictional archaeologist of them all, actually is the exception that proves the rule. In two of the Indiana Jones films, the magical items of interest (the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail) are sacred (though not "real" in that they do not currently exist if they ever did) objects in the religions and cultures of the filmmakers and their likely audience. Much more commonly in fiction, if magical items or rituals "really" work in a supernatural way, they are often "exotic." There are any number of cliches from the "Indian" burial ground that haunts a modern family, as in The Shining

the "African" mask that raises the dead, like the subject of this clip from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where an occultist mocks a "mundane" American for not automatically assuming a piece of art might be a dangerous supernatural object

to the Sankara stones, the non-Judeo-Christian entry in the Indiana Jones films, the one that turns a skeptical materialist Jones into someone open to supernatural abilities and rituals. Even when a film or book calls for a Christian ritual or holy object, it will likely turn to a Catholic image, as the more "exotic" faith (in societies such as the United States, where Protestants have traditionally been the dominant and unmarked branch of Christianity), and hence more likely to be able to work magic. The Exorcist immediately comes to mind, with its famous scene of Catholic priests confronting a possessed child, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention the almost baffling inclusion of an archaeological excavation as the root of the evil, just as an archaeological site plays into the climax of The Omen.

From this perspective, museums (especially those stocked in the bad old days) are warehouses full of supernatural power. This has become a fictional trope all its own, with entire film and television series dedicated to the concept. Having ghosts wandering around the Etruscan wing, as in the Penn video at the top of this post, is right from this trope. The scale of earlier archaeology conducted in colonial contexts, and of museums from this age, also increases the impact of early stereotypes.

- Prehistoric societies, and the archaeology of them, have long been conflated with contacting other and alien realms. With the establishment of deep time, it has become clear that most of human existence was not documented by contemporary written records, but is pre-history. Both fictional and pseudoscientific mythmakers have been in competition with archaeologists for a long time in trying to fill the maps of time. Archaeologists have tried to carefully chart out the outlines of the past, while fictional authors and pseudoscientists and mystics have more often than not written "here be monsters" on the blank spots of the past. Sometimes literal monsters in the form of strange Lemurians (as per the Theosophists), monstrous aliens like Cthulhu and its ilk (despite being monstrously old and inhuman, they still have the trappings of ancient archaeological sites not too different from human settlements, a symbol of their antiquity or way of making them intelligible to the audience), or somewhat less monstrous beings like ancient aliens correlating with modern tales of Grays or Reptilians. Alternatively, and more commonly, wondrous ancient peoples, though often visually taking cues from real societies, have been created to populate the past. Any number of mythical civilizations and Golden Ages have been constructed to satisfy modern ideologies or emotional desires. When archaeologists feel frustrated by paranormal and pseudoscientific believers, this is the angle that bothers them the most.

- Archaeologists are conflated with detectives, and detectives are an integral part of supernatural fiction. In his book Archaeology is a Brand, Cornelius Holtorf explores the images of archaeologists in popular culture, and argues (as I will to some degree below) that archaeologists should curb some of the excesses of their image, but that their "brand" has power and value that should not be simply denied or discarded (if this were even possible). One of the four major images of the archaeologist that Holtorf identifies is the Detective, piecing together clues from the past. When archaeologists popularize their work (Death by Theory, Time Detectives), the Detective is one of the most common images chosen (it can avoid the colonial baggage of being an adventurer or in presenting "exotic" wisdom, but is more popular and "fun" than being presented as a heritage manager in a worksite vest). And the Detective is also one of the most common characters in supernatural horror fiction. Most traditional horror stories (as noted by Kathleen Spencer in her article "Victorian Urban Gothic: The First Modern Fantastic Literature" in Intersections) conform to a "discovery plot," where monstrous horror (often arisen from the past) threatens decent people and civilization. Our protagonist or protagonists slowly learn of the horror and its nature, but must piece it all together from clues, and will have difficulty convincing society of what they have discovered. Only through solving these mysteries, often through embracing "exotic" knowledge, can the evil be destroyed or contained. While literal detectives (see The X-Files) are common in such stories, all that is needed is a character that acts in the fashion of a detective, piecing together clues with an inquiring intellect and perhaps expert knowledge of scholarship or science. Dracula is a classic example of this, where van Helsing (a scholar) leads a band of materialist Victorians (including a psychiatrist) in piecing together clues that demand they adopt supernatural knowledge (holy rituals to destroy vampires, and knowledge of how a vampire operates) in order to defeat an ancient evil.

What to do about it?

Archaeologists can shape their practices and products to be engaged with postcolonial concerns, relevant social and ecological inquiry, and participate in discussions and policy regarding cultural and historical heritage. And yet for all that, they still end up being seen by the public as cavorting with mummies, curses, aliens, and spirits. Given the above reasons for this entanglement, what can archaeologists do?

- Is there any benefit to utilizing the paranormal as a "hook," as I've argued skeptics have with varying degrees of success? This is a very difficult question to answer. On the one hand, it seems like this path is fraught with peril, given the colonialist aspect to some of this entanglement. Yet two facts remain. First, there have been successful applications of skeptical invocation of pseudoarchaeology to teach the real deal. Kenneth Feder's Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries is a very successful text on this topic, and other authors have likewise been able to teach by applying principles of science, critical thinking, and archaeology to such "mysteries." Second, as noted above, this entanglement is going to exist to some degree whether archaeologists like it or not. As biologists have learned from the rise of Intelligent Design Creationism, ignoring pseudoscience won't make it go away and may help it to spread in influence. While there is an inherent tie between death/the past and archaeology, archaeologists should emphasize they are more interested in trying to understand once living people through their material culture. Death is not the point, it is simply the necessary context to try to study the once-living. Most archaeologists would indeed say as much, but this point should continue to be emphasized, including in dealings with the press.

- Should archaeologists avoid the exotic? Yes, but they have to understand it won't just go away. "The exotic" has huge problems, and no real place in the practice of modern anthropology. And yet, because it is such a powerful "brand," there is the temptation to utilize it. I find myself wanting to resort to it at times in informal discussion, and have to re-evaluate and rewind. While none of this is news to anyone educated in anthropology in the recent past, the exotic or sensational will be the expectation of the press and public. Archaeologists that ignore this expectation completely run the risk of making their voice irrelevant to the larger audience, leaving space for pseudoscientists and mythmakers more than willing to trade on pop cultural expectations. Again, a difficult balancing bridge between reifying colonialist images and practices, and removing oneself from the public conversation by being too ethically informed for the room.

- But what about that inherent view of ruins as "spooky?" Explain it. Archaeologists are accustomed to dealing with multi-component sites, with several time periods of occupation, even if they are only interested in one. Rather than ignore that the site or culture or artifacts you work with have gained supernatural baggage, archaeologists should investigate the history of how that baggage came into existence, and why it has persisted. In his book Objects (my review), on material culture studies, Chris Caple emphasizes studying all of the transformations an object has had, including after it was deposited in the archaeological record, recovered, and brought into a laboratory or museum. I think we should have the same attitude towards the "historiography" or memory of an artifact, a site, or an archaeological culture. It isn't just being able to demonstrate that a tomb doesn't have a curse, or that a henge was built by neolithic farmers and not faeries, but also understanding the historical evidence for where these beliefs come from, how they've changed, and why they're held. If we're interested in how humans construct identity and practice with material culture, surely this should be of interest to archaeologists. And it makes answering the usual questions from the public much easier.

Why Skepticism is So Important: The anti-Muslim FBI CounterTerrorist Expert and the Satanic Panic

2011-09-15T10:42:00.003-05:00

A recent revelation of anti-Muslim FBI counterterrorism training suggests disturbing parallels to previous panics, including the Satanic Panic of the 1980s.

Wired Magazine is running an expose on counter-intelligence training within the FBI that trains agents that, I'll quote the Wired piece

"“main stream” [sic] American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers; that the Prophet Mohammed was a “cult leader”; and that the Islamic practice of giving charity is no more than a “funding mechanism for combat.”
At the Bureau’s training ground in Quantico, Virginia, agents are shown a chart contending that the more “devout” a Muslim, the more likely he is to be “violent.” Those destructive tendencies cannot be reversed, an FBI instructional presentation adds: “Any war against non-believers is justified” under Muslim law; a “moderating process cannot happen if the Koran continues to be regarded as the unalterable word of Allah.”
These are excerpts from dozens of pages of recent FBI training material on Islam that Danger Room has acquired. In them, the Constitutionally protected religious faith of millions of Americans is portrayed as an indicator of terrorist activity."

The author of the training briefings is William Gawthrop, a faculty member at American Military University, a for-profit university focused on military and law enforcement issues, aiming its recruitment especially at veterans. Gawthrop, prior to the Wired piece, was an expert on Islamic law and war for WorldNetDaily, a far-right website known for calls and dreams for secession and "civilian uprising" by actor Chuck Norris and singer Pat Boone, but more recently for being the center of "birther" conspiracy theories that claimed U.S. President Barack Obama was not born in the United States or otherwise is not a natural citizen.

This pattern should be very familiar to anyone who paid attention to the havoc wreaked by the Satanic Panic a generation ago. In the 1960s, foreign and new religions were recognized and gained ground in the United States, including the Church of Satan, driven by charismatic showman and entertainer Anton LaVey. But starting in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, a few of these new religions, or cults as their detractors called them, met disastrous ends. The Manson family and its infamous murders was not a religious movement, but was lumped in due to its cultish structure and nature. The nadir of all of this was the Jonestown murders and massacre in which 918 people were either killed or committed suicide in the self-destruction of the People's Temple after the murder of a fact-finding mission led by a U.S. Congressman.

Jonestown became the bedrock of the anti-cult movement. While the movement was already underway, the Jonestown horror gave it much more credibility. As a result, throughout the 1980s especially, the myth of a grand Satanic Conspiracy thrived in American culture. It was a popular theme in movies and television, and it wasn't hard to find media with scenes of ritual human sacrifices by robed cultists. Satanic-themed entertainment had already been popular with movies like The Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby, or The Omen, but the trope became commonplace. Satanists became the first explanation for rumor panics of "cattle mutilations" in the American Plains and West, until UFOs became a more popular explanation. The most public and most ridiculed component of this was the campaign against Dungeons and Dragons (let us all remember to mourn Black Leaf) and against heavy metal music, both products of 1970s pop culture that incorporated elements of fantasy and demonic imagery, just as did the previously mentioned films and television shows. However, because these were media aimed primarily at teenagers, they were seen as particular threats.

But the Satanic Panic also intersected at times with law enforcement. You can explore the extensive wiki page as a start on the topic, but people were investigated, accused, and tried for crimes based on what turned out to be faulty or misleading coaching of witnesses, in some cases alleging vast mass murders and other crimes that were simply physically impossible, and would leave overwhelming physical evidence where none existed. These investigations were at times prompted either directly or as part of a general atmosphere encouraged by "anti-cult experts" that would give instructional briefings to law enforcement, educators, and other authority figures. While not in all cases, in quite a few these experts were heavily invested as activists of a fundamentalist Christianity that was on the rise starting in the 1970s. And some of their "expert advice" reflected this, while other advice was simply silly (infamously telling parents or educators that graph paper [for Dungeons & Dragons maps] and mirrors were signs of Satanic ritual magic on the part of their children or students). I've blogged about this before as a form of "folk archaeology."

The Satanic Panic isn't old news either, at least not entirely. It made headlines again in a different way, with the release of the West Memphis Three. Likewise, such allegations have become involved in the prosecutions in the Meredith Kercher murder case, better known by the name of the woman convicted for the crime, Amanda Knox, who like the West Memphis Three has attracted considerable international support by people who doubt the case against her.

The revelation of the FBI briefing authored by Gawthrop reminds me strongly of some of the "anti-cult expertise" offered to law enforcement during the Satanic Panic. I don't know Gawthrop's religious background, but it is hard to miss the zealotry against Islam, while praising Judaism and Christianity (Gawthrop even provides a graph!).

But a bigger pattern is present. In both cases, horrific criminal acts including mass murder provide credibility to "experts" who instead push religious or political issues. The horror of these mass casualty events, as well as smaller but more gruesome events associated with the larger threat, is a powerful influence on people who might otherwise rationally dismiss some of the more absurdist ideology coming from these "experts." Further, by pointing at the wrong targets, these "experts" get to attack those people and communities they don't like, but actually cloud and damage real efforts to deal realistically with threats. Was training like Gawthrop's responsible for the detention, interrogation, and strip searching of Shoshana Hebshi this last weekend, along with other unnamed people, all of whom were either from southern or southwest Asia, or had genetic heritage as such, and committed no crimes nor ultimately were found to be at all suspicious?

The pattern of rumor panics is a familiar one. It's no accident that Arthur Miller was able to find such easily parallels between McCarthyite anti-communism and the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. In the case of McCarthyism, in addition to the general Cold War fears, that war had recently turned hot in Korea. It has been suggested that the Salem trials may have been nursed by anxiety stemming from recent bloody wars with Native Americans, wars that had not gone well and were considered incompetent or failed by the populace. The witch trials may have been an expression of powerlessness, fear, and anger over failure.

I visited Salem this summer, a weird tourism experience to say the least. But in the more serious moments, the tragedy does come through, and reminds us that just because something horrible is happened, we shouldn't just listen to whoever gives us the most lurid and enticing take on the matter, one that we can deploy against the innocent when we can't lash out against real threats.

So I'll leave this with part of the memorial to the victims of the Salem trials

Cryptids: A glaring dichotomy

2011-07-21T12:45:00.003-05:00

The sci-fi/fantasy arm of Gawker, io9, is having a "cryptid summer," about which I was initially, well, skeptical.

But I think they've handled it fairly well. And today brings us probably the best example of this:

Compare and contrast

The Weirdest Mystery Animals in the World

with

Ten extinct animals that have been rediscovered

Look, I think monster stories and legends are fun and awesome. But it is notable that, with one "exception,", discovered land animals of the 20th century and early 21st century are more or less mundane. They aren't the monsters of folklore and cryptozoology.

The "maybe" exception is the Bili Ape. The exact nature of the Bili Ape is still a matter of controversy, but it is physiologically fairly similar to other chimpanzees (it is behavior which is more strikingly different). While extremely interesting and important for primate studies, it is not very surprising that one group of chimpanzees with different behavior might not be recognized without careful observation, and certainly isn't the stuff of cryptozoology (the typical cryptid quarry is usually something monstrous that looks nothing like any other species around it).

In the oceans, more "monstrous" creatures do continue to be discovered, which is not surprising given the largely unexplored nature of the seas (whereas exploration of the land was largely a matter of Europeans and their documentation entering the rest of the globe, a process mostly concluded by the twentieth century). However, these creatures are typically not the stuff of legends, but instead complete surprises (see the megamouth shark for example, or the coelacanth for that matter, and arguably the colossal squid). The last great discovery of a truly monstrous creature of legend from the seas would be the giant squid, and while video of a living squid has only been captured in the early 21st century, bodies of the Architeuthis dux have been collected by scientists for a century and a half.

A century of specimens of one of the "name brand" cryptids would easily move such creatures (as it did with the giant squid) out of the shadows of myth, and into the realm of biology. But body parts or complete specimens of "name brand" cryptids, on the other hand, often only surface in the context of conflicting stories, before the whole thing falls apart (any number of examples can suffice, but the Georgia Bigfoot is a good recent example).

A project for an enterprising researcher might be to count up the number of documented sightings of the giant squid during the time period specimens have been recovered (since the 1850s). I'd be curious to know which has been seen more often and with more regularity: the giant squid which produced numerous carcasses, or a sea serpent/lake monster/hairy humanoid/pteradon/bloodsucking freak that has produced no corpses.

Demons, the Great Old Ones, and the Unified Field Theory of the Paranormal

2011-06-25T15:14:00.005-05:00

Is there a unified theory of paranormal thinking replacing the alternative belief structures of the 20th century? A recent address by conspiracy theory master Alex Jones veered into territory he normally doesn't cover, non-human entities and their role in what he believes to be a global elite bent on depopulating the earth.

The statements in the video above may not make a great deal of sense to you, but they are in fact quite in keeping with some of the more esoteric theories held by some of the more esoteric thinkers or intellectuals of the UFO community and other alternative belief sets. John Keel, author of The Mothman Prophecies (my review can be read here), was one of the first to suggest that rather than spaceships, UFOs and their occupants were signs of interdimensional entities that had been here for far longer than the modern era of flying saucers. Keel echoed Charles Fort's infamous phrase from The Book of the Damned, "I think we're property," while contemporary Jacques Vallee wrote of a control system that might be guiding (and not necessarily for the good) the religious and cultural development of humanity.

With the rise of abduction changing the face of ufology, Terrence McKenna's machine elves, which he said he saw while under the influence of DMT, became roped in with aliens, opening the suggestion that they weren't aliens at all, or not even necessarily physical in the sense we may suggest. Graham Hancock, famous for his books and tv shows arguing for lost Paleolithic Civilizations leaving traces like the Sphinx (or inspiring its makers), possibly from the continent of Antarctica, has picked up this idea, suggesting in his book Supernatural (review) that human modernity and civilization derives from contact and influence with such entities or constructs through the use of hallucinogens.

This is half the idea that Jones lays out in his "rant" above, that "clockwork elves" speak to DMT users, that they are not in our dimension but might be able to reach it via a machine like the Large Hadron Collider, and that they are the fairies and aliens of our legends and occult lore.

The other half of the equation according to Jones is that they are either worshiped or otherwise served by a secret global elite society. Jones himself says in the video that this sounds like David Icke's talk of a cult led by shapeshifting Reptilians (an idea lifted right from Robert E. Howard's fantasy story "The Shadow Kingdom," and alluded to in the film Conan the Barbarian). Indeed, Jones is suggesting with this statement an immense time depth and possible purpose to the Illuminati he fears are planning to install a global police state to control those who aren't killed in vast depopulation plans. But an equally appropriate link would be to a section of Christian evangelicals that have embraced the idea that UFOs are demons in disguise. One group has set up shop in the flying saucer Mecca, Roswell, New Mexico (I attended a Raelian meeting in their lobby, something I still don't entirely understand). Nick Redfern has recently published a book, Final Events, specifically suggesting something akin to Jones' concerns, of a group within the US government and US politics trying to contact and control such entities, or alternatively planning to turn America into a theocratic police state in order to fight such creatures, or rather, demons.

In short, Jones is arguing that there is a world-wide conspiracy that either is (or believes it is) contacting ancient extradimensional entities, ones with plans dangerous for humanity, in order that they can join with these entities. The group lives without morality, practicing bizarre rituals behind closed doors and acting without concern for Christian or conventional values, instead planning a bizarre future and the mass killing of millions. They intend to bring about the end of the recognizable world and let demonic aliens through interdimensional gates, ushering in the fall of man as dominant species on this planet.

If you read my other blog, Miskatonic Museum, based on the history and science associated with the cosmic horror tales of H. P. Lovecraft, this should sound very, very familiar to you. It's the Cthulhu Cult (I discuss some of the influences on the idea of the fictional Cthulhu Cult here), with a bit of the Whateleys thrown in for good measure (compare with the excerpt from the Necronomicon in "The Dunwich Horror".

Nor is it to be thought (ran the text as Armitage mentally translated it) that man is either the oldest or the last of earth's masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, they walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen. Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They had trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread. By Their smell can men sometimes know Them near, but of Their semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those They have begotten on mankind; and of those are there many sorts, differing in likeness from man's truest eidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is Them. They walk unseen and foul in lonely places where the Words have been spoken and the Rites howled through at their Seasons. The wind gibbers with Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness. They bend the forest and crush the city, yet may not forest or city behold the hand that smites. Kadath in the cold waste hath known Them, and what man knows Kadath? The ice desert of the South and the sunken isles of Ocean hold stones whereon Their seal is engraved, but who hath seen the deep frozen city or the sealed tower long garlanded with seaweed and barnacles? Great Cthulhu is Their cousin, yet can he spy Them only dimly. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold. Yog-Sothoth is the key to the gate, whereby the spheres meet. Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall They reign again."

These stories speak of ancient conspiracies and cults of bizarre and amoral cultists who seek to allow horrific alien monstrosities known as the Great Old Ones into our world, to do horrible things to it and us, so that they can rule as humanity's masters, free from morality. Just as Lovecraft's writings were heavily influential (though not exclusively so) in creating the idea of ancient astronauts, are we now to see Lovecraft and co. birthing the 21st century's mix of demology, conspiracy theory, and paranormality?

Jones would not be the first to take this route, as David Icke has pointed to the faux-Necronomicon by "Simon" and to Doreal's Howard and Lovecraft inspired writings as evidence of his claims. Kenneth Grant's Typhonian writings also tread this territory, as ably dissected by Justin Woodman in his four-part lecture series on Lovecraft and "occulture," where he also discusses the alien astronaut tie, and briefly discusses Icke. It's a recurring theme in Nick Redfern's books, not just his Final Events (in which he reports on, but does not believe in, this worldview, an attitude echoed by Jones in the above video), but in others where he describes occultists and Fortean investigators dealing with extradimensional spirits or entities, and elite secret groups well aware of them. Cattle mutilation researcher and Trickster theorist Christopher O'Brien has also speculated that government or other shadowy operatives may be involved in animal mutilations as a method of controlling or preventing the arrival and actions of interdimensional entities through techniques similar to what ancient religions called blood magic and sacrifice.

And so on, there are others. But Jones, a commentator that has appeared on Fox News and other mainstream mass media, that has been pointed to as the underground inspiration for Glenn Beck, suggesting that the core of the secret societies he has dedicated his life to fighting, and in doing so becoming the highest profile conspiracy theory advocate in modern America, is a landmark moment. It could mean that Jones alienates (so to speak) many of his listeners. Alternatively, this may be a tipping point for mainstreaming what I believe is the coming focus of alternative or paranormal belief systems: demonology. I've outlined above how it has always been with ufology before there were flying saucers, and how it has grown. It is also a topic not too far from many discussions of ghosts and ghost hunting. The Warrens on a number of occasions emphasized the possibility of a demonic role in the hauntings they were involved in. More recently, demons and ghosts have mixed on ghost hunting television shows like Paranormal State. A recent book suggests a very similar model behind beliefs in Djinn in Muslim societies, complete with an American secret effort to capture a djinn, and a secret history of djinn as masters of the planet aiming to re-enter our world and take it over. Even cryptozoology shades into the demonological and extradimensional in the writings of some of the authors mentioned above, and in narratives such as Hunt for the Skinwalker, documenting a secret but high profile investigation in Utah in the 1990s, painted with heavy overtones of the interdimensional, an including Bigfoot in the mix.

What might this change suggest? One obvious, perhaps too obvious solution, would be to point to the growth of politicized and radicalized religion in the United States, and an increasingly loud war with science. The idea of ghost hunting and parapsychology emerged out of Spiritualism in the Victorian era (when scientific progress was the definition of civilization over barbarism, and evolution the philosophical backbone of modernity), coming into its own in the interwar period, and gaining some modicum of scientific cover with psychic research in the mid-20th century. Around mid-century, cryptozoology and ufology both took their early cues from science, either in the form of expeditions and writings with a strictly biological bent suggesting the discovery of unknown or supposedly extinct creatures, or saucer organizations modeled on amateur science clubs or scientific organizations, focused on collecting sighting data for statistical analysis.

They did this in the era of big science, when laboratories could cure diseases, win wars, and build a better tomorrow through chemistry and atomic power. But then it all changed. Anti-science sentiments grew on the political left (over concerns of ecological damage, a revulsion at modernity, and the role of science in imperialism and warfare), and on the religious right (in ways too numerous to note, but generally involving both the clash with biblical literalism, and elements of populism and class conflict, what gets labeled "the Culture War" in the media). Within scholarship, the flaws and human frailties of the scientific community were also given a greater profile through postmodern and deconstructionist techniques (most famously Thomas Kuhn's argument that science is a succession of paradigms, tied to the production of knowledge and internal politics within the scientific community, rather than a simple accumulation of knowledge and understanding). For these and other reasons, science's prestige has been tarnished, and it is more often associated with visions of a future dystopia rather than a Gernsbackian or Jetsonian wonderland of Tomorrow.

Should we be surprised that belief communities that had once modeled themselves after prestigious science, have now backed away from this role, and that some have turned to demonology in the face of a resurgent movement of Biblical literalism in religion and politics?

EDIT: Found an even more illustrative passage from "The Dunwich Horror." Read and compare with Jones' video.

'It was—well, it was mostly a kind of force that doesn't belong in our part
of space; a kind of force that acts and grows and shapes itself by other laws
than those of our sort of Nature. We have no business calling in such things
from outside, and only very wicked people and very wicked cults ever try to.
... if you men are wise you'll dynamite that altar-stone up there, and pull
down all the rings of standing stones on the other hills. Things like that
brought down the beings those Whateleys were so fond of—the beings they were
going to let in tangibly to wipe out the human race and drag the earth off to
some nameless place for some nameless purpose.

When Prophecy Fails and the May 21 Apocalypse

2011-05-07T19:46:00.002-05:00

By now, you may have heard of the Christian sect that believes that the world is going to enter its final days on May 21 of this year, concluding with the planet's destruction in October.

I could pontificate about this, but really, the best thing you could do between now and then, is to read the classic work on apocalyptic cults and cognitive dissonance, Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter's When Prophecy Fails (link leads to amazon.com for purchase). It focuses on a flying saucer contactee group in the 1950s (more info at the wiki). The group advertised the end of the world, looking for others to be saved by their space brothers (the one leading them, Sananda from the planet Clarion, also appeared in the past as Jesus according to the group's views). Since it has been written there have been rebuttals and debate regarding the book's key element, the idea of cognitive dissonance. The authors argue that apocalyptic groups invest themselves so much in a falsifiable event (either the world ends, or it doesn't) that when it is falsified, they redouble their efforts and modify their ideology, because admitting their error (often accompanied by public and potentially embarrassing decisions such as quitting a job or leaving a community due to the end of the world) would be too painful. But never minding that, it is easily comparable to the current May 21 group, except that the May 21 group is closer to a much bigger religious tradition, while the followers of Sister Thedra were part of a much more fringe subculture.

The opening of When Prophecy Fails makes it clear exactly how unoriginal such apocalyptic groups are, and how often they follow a similar pattern: once the prophecy fails and the world continues, the group decides that their faith saved the planet, and they launch into a surge of proselytizing. It won't be terribly surprising if we see the same thing here.

Spooky News - Now on Twitter!

2010-11-27T09:43:00.003-06:00

Sometimes something weird comes across my desk, and I don't have too much to say other than "Hey, look at this weird thing, but don't touch it you fool!" If headlines such as "Whitest Voodoo Priests Ever Team Up to Fight Hitler" or "US Military to Weaponize Flying Snakes" pique your interest, just follow me on Twitter by hitting the button on the right. These and other strange stories will show up in your electro-tickertape fresh from the workshop.

The Witch and Cthulhu Cults

2010-10-31T20:28:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted from my other blog Miskatonic Museum, a little Halloween night piece on how one archaeologist's side-project was instrumental in the formation of a religion and the creation of an enduring fictional mythology.

Wytches - Inkubbus Sukkubus

Wicca and the Cthulhu Mythos largely spring from one source: Margaret Murray’s 1921 book The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. This is not meant as any offense to Wiccans or other neopagans, but instead of two diverging cases stemming from one source, and the power that a scholar’s writings might have, whether intended or not.

Margaret Murray and the Witch-Cult

Margaret Murray was born in Calcutta on July 13, 1863. An odd coincidence, her family included Phillips’, as did Lovecraft’s, but I do not know if there was any relation. She grew up in England near the White Horse, the Dragon Mount, and other points of both antiquarian and folkloric interest, likely influencing the course her life took (Murray 1963: 11 – 29, 62, 207).

Rather than train to study Britain, Murray went to study with the pioneering Egyptologist, Professor Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie of University College, London. Murray excavated with Petrie’s team in the early years of the 20th century, and published several books on those excavations as well as the grammar of Egyptian and Coptic (Murray 1963: 207 – 208). In 1920, during her times with the Copts, Murray was the subject of a cleansing ritual against rabies after being bitten by a dog (Murray 1963: 143 – 147). But other than a few years working with Petrie in Egypt (and then work in Palestine and Jordan in the 1930s, including at the world-famous site of Petra), Murray was often stuck teaching Petrie’s students while he was out of country (Drower 2004: 115, 128 – 129). She was also active in promoting the importance of anthropology to the training of imperial administrators and colonists overseas (Murray 1963: 96 – 97).

But probably her most influential work concerns Europe. Her work interrupted by the Great War (including a brief stint as a nurse), Murray turned her attention more to European prehistory and folklore. In 1915 she took vacation to Glastonbury where she saw Egyptian elements in the stories of Joseph of Arimathea and the Holy Grail (Murray 1963: 104). She excavated in Malta and Minorca in the 1920s and early 1930s, with a focus on megalithic sites, as well as excavation of a medieval site in England. The medieval excavation in Whomerle Wood was never published, leaving notes only in a local volunteer society, but at least one Murray biographer wonders if Murray’s new interest in medieval witch cases may have been behind the excavation (Drower 2004: 123 – 124). On Malta, she also investigated local folklore of spirits, buried treasure, and other topics, and became a member of the Folk-lore Society during this time, eventually becoming its president in 1953 (Murray 1963: 131 – 132, 207 – 208).

This turn to legends and the hidden spirit world manifested most prominently in her research and belief that medieval witch accusations and trial documents were not made up out of whole cloth, but instead were proof that medieval and early modern inquisitors had uncovered and worked to exterminate an ancient religion, one involving not the Devil, but a man costumed as a pre-Christian god. She condemned archaeological treatment of religion due to its Judeo-Christian bias, arguing that religion has evolved into different forms or methods to understand and influence the unknown spiritual power of the universe. She particularly notes that Goddess preceded God as women produce children and food, the basic stuff of life (Murray 1963: 196 – 198).

Murray’s view of archaeology and the occult was much closer to the conventional view, that they are intertwined, than is typically found amongst members of the profession. In the thirteen chapters of her autobiography, one concerns the methods and nature of archaeology, the other, an exploration of the occult. In the occult chapter, she states. “I find that all good archaeologists are expected to have had at least one occult experience either personal or of somebody that he knows.” Many of these tales, Murray notes, fall apart upon examination, especially those of Egyptian curses. Nevertheless, she advocated study of telepathy and ghosts, suggesting that ghosts were not disembodied spirits so much as some kind of light record of old events that manifested in moist or humid air such as Scotland or India (and come to think of it, the American South) (Murray 1963: 175 – 183).

Murray presented her Old Religion findings in The Witch-Cult in Western Europe in 1921. These ideas met mixed to negative criticism, and her second book on the topic, The God of the Witches in 1933, was ignored until after WWII. With the renewed recognition, Murray published The Divine King in England in 1954. This same year, Gerald Gardner published Witchcraft Today, arguably the text that founds an open Wiccan paganism in Britain, cementing the idea of a prehistoric surviving pagan Old Religion into the popular consciousness. Margaret Murray wrote the forward to Witchcraft Today, and is considered the “godmother” of the witches. Margot Adler (1986: 549), author of the classic Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America, points to Murray as the real beginning of the Wicca revival, and supports at least some of the elder scholar’s findings.

The nature and extent of the religion was modified as Murray continued to write. At its core, Murray described the witch-cult as a pre-agricultural, pre-Indo-European religion. Memories of some of the people of pre-IE Europe are carried down, according to Murray, as stories of fairies and elves who faded into obscurity and extinction (with perhaps the exception of groups like the Lapps or Basques) as agriculturalists moved in. This concept of fairy folklore as a reflection of migrations and of a lost Neolithic or older people was not invented by Murray, and was more popular in the later Victorian era. The Old Religion was then adopted by later invaders, transforming it into Diana worship, prompting Murray to call the religion Dianic regardless of the period in question. As “described,” according to Murray, in the later witch-trials, it was a matriarchal society, but later she viewed it as a duality, incorporating a horned male deity that can be traced to Paleolithic cave paintings. The modern stereotype of witches organized into covens of 13 is largely due to Murray. They had holy days on May Eve, Halloween, Candlemas, Beltane, Yule, and Lammas, as well as weekly ceremonies Murray coined as “esbats.” Following the medieval horror story testimonies, Murray believed that the cult sacrificed and cannibalized their own children, an element of the Old Religion which was minimized in Murray’s later writings and has not been very popular in the decades since (Waugh 1994: 4 – 5). In her later works, Murray’s witch-cult begins to resemble conspiracy theory as much as anthropology, with the British royals and other famous figures in European history as part of the cult, and many of their deaths secretly ritual murders, the killing of the king so important to both Murray’s work and Frazier’s The Golden Bough (Adler 1986: 47 – 48).

The concept of a Dianic witch-cult was not invented by Murray. Notions of pagan survivals had sporadically appeared in the nineteenth-century investigations of European folklore. Murray drew on these concepts, including Jules Michelet’s La Sorciere, and anthropologist Karl Pearson’s claim that Joan of Arc was part of a Goddess cult, a claim that appears in Murray’s God of the Witches (Hutton 1999: 31 – 33). Probably the most direct ancestor of Murray’s ideas would be Charles Leland’s work at the turn of the century. Leland was something of a cultural, intellectual, and political rebel. In addition to studying Native American and Roma (gypsy) folklore, Leland claimed that he was given a book by a surviving member of a hereditary witch family in Italy, whose practices had descended from the Etruscans. He published this as Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches in 1899 (Adler 1986: 56 – 57). While Murray’s work has been heavily criticized as misunderstanding the nature and context of the witch-trial testimonies, some pagan survival does seem to have occurred, such as the benandanti of Italy studied by Carlo Ginzburg in The Night Battles: Witchcraft & Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth & Seventeenth Centuries. Ginzburg also trial and other historical documents, but to general scholarly acceptance, to chronicle a secret society that fought anti-Christian witches with their own magic and sabbat-like meetings. But these folk religions are not considered synonymous in scale nor specifics with Murray’s witch-cult.

And perhaps most importantly for our current discussion, ideas of witchcraft and prehistoric races surviving in fairy lore in the British Isles was a theme in the fiction of Arthur Machen. A theme very much enjoyed by the creator of the Cthulhu Cult.

Lovecraft and the Witch-Cult

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was largely an auto-didact. In his avocation of astronomy, and his passion for the Classics and Roman history, this self-learning was largely sufficient. But when it came to anthropology (especially race), prehistory, and non-Classical or English history, topics of great interest to Lovecraft and prominent in his fiction, his self-learning often fell flat. He often relied on texts from his youth, texts already outdated at times by decades. This pattern contributed to a tendency to pick and choose knowledge based on how much it conformed to Lovecraft’s preconceived notions (at the same time that Lovecraft strenuously argued for rational materialist atheism in the face of others preconceived notions). Or as in the case of the witch-cult, how much it tickled his fancy for the weird and mysterious. Lovecraft became obsessed with the witch-cult. As Donald Waugh (1994: 4) has argued, Murray’s book inspired Lovecraft in understanding myth as residue of history, and in supporting the worldview Lovecraft had already developed.

Conflicting reports, including Lovecraft’s letters, suggest he read Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe in either 1923 or 1924, but 1923 seems more likely based on internal evidence from his commonplace book and the story “The Festival.” Murray’s witch-cult informs that story of a hidden ancestral occult sect. And the witch-cult combined with stereotypes and outright slurs against the Yezidi of Iraq as Satanists, forms the core of “The Horror at Red Hook.” These stories demonstrate Lovecraft’s fondness for the idea, a fondness he also demonstrated in private letters. In 1930, Lovecraft wrote two multi-page essay-letters to Robert E. Howard, expounding upon the cult at length. Unlike Theosophy, which HPL utilized as a source for his fiction but chalked up as soft-headed myth, he presents the witch-cult as historical and anthropological fact. Published in Selected Letters, a few snippets give the general flavor.

“ … the fact, now widely emphasized by by anthropologists, that the traditional features of witch-practice and Sabbat-orgies were by no means mythical … Something actual was going on under the surface”

“scholars now recognise that all through history a secret cult of degenerate orgiastic nature-worshippers, furtively recruited from the peasantry and sometimes from decadent characters of more select origin, has existed throughout northwestern Europe … It has no inclusive name recognised by its own adherents, but is customarily called simply “witch-cult” by modern anthropologists. Evidences of its persistent existence and unvarying practices are revealed by multitudes of trials, legends, and historic incidents; and by piecing these together we have today a very fair idea of its nature and workings.”

There is far, far more in this letter, describing Lovecraft’s mix of racial and cultural history in Europe, viewing the witch-cult as the religion of “prehistoric Mongoloids” and then infiltrating the Romans. The cult was nearly exterminated by Christianity, which was shocked by its erotic elements, but after the Black Death it was revived by those despairing of the world. The cult is blended at this time with Satan, and becomes a more open force in late medieval Europe, resulting in a backlash of both vigilantism (which HPL compares to the Ku Klux Klan active at its peak in the US at that time) and the more organized witch hunting that finally wipes the cult out (HPL letter to Robert E. Howard, October 4, 1930, Published in Lovecraft 1971: 178 – 181, Letter 428). In an earlier letter, Lovecraft dwells obsessively on the racial components of this faulty history, with more of an emphasis in the racial-cultural history of Europe in response to Howard’s tales of fantasized prehistory (HPL letter to Robert E. Howard, July 20, 1930, Published in Lovecraft 1971: 161 – 163, Letter 419).

Donald Waugh goes into greater detail of some of the specifics of Lovecraft's writings in relation to the witch-cult. But I think it most be emphasized how crucial Murray's book is to the creation of the Cthulhu Mythos, and Lovecraft's sea change in, as Waugh puts it, perspective. Even more striking is that this appears to be the one bit of non-mainstream knowledge Lovecraft really went for. His racism was disputed by some anthropological authorities and was somewhat outdated, but it wasn't that hard in the 1920s to find experts to back up scientific racism (see Stephen J. Gould's The Mismeasure of Man for an excellent overview of scientific racism). And Lovecraft did hold out some support for trans-Pacific contacts with the Americas, and perhaps a sunken continent (he was also famously an early adopter of the then-discredited theory of continental drift). None of these would put Lovecraft out on a limb intellectually as would his acceptance of Murray's ideas and their importance as a framework for prehistory. And none would have such a direct impact on his stories, starting with "The Festival" and "The Horror at Red Hook."

The Witch-Cult and the Cthulhu Mythos

In these early tales, Lovecraft has difficulty making the witch-cult cosmic. “The Festival” has dream-like and cosmic aspects to it, most famously the byakhee. But “Red Hook” is a straight Manichaean tale of good vs. evil, Satanists vs. the wholesome. And it’s pretty terrible. But when he figured out how to marry the witch-cult to the cosmic, Lovecraft not only wrote his most famous work, he created the basic outline of his Mythos, and as argued by Jason Colavito and others, invented the idea of the ancient astronaut. The witch-cult is the direct inspiration for the Cthulhu Cult.

In “The Call of Cthulhu,” Professor Angell’s notes assure us that the the Cthulhu cult is not the witch-cult.

“Of the cult, he said that he thought the centre lay amid the pathless deserts of Arabia, where Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched. It was not allied to the European witch-cult, and was virtually unknown beyond its members.”

But HPL protests too much. The evidence is plain in his “Commonplace Book,” a scratch book Lovecraft used to jot down ideas for later use in fiction. Amongst the 1923 entries are the following.

101 Hideous secret society—widespread—horrible rites in caverns under familiar scenes—one’s own neighbour may belong. [x]
109 Ancient negro voodoo wizard in cabin in swamp—possesses white man.
110 Antediluvian—Cyclopean ruins on lonely Pacific island. Centre of earthwide subterranean witch cult.
111 Ancient ruin in Alabama swamp—voodoo.

Items 101 is arguably “The Festival,” and perhaps “Red Hook. But items 109, 110, and 111 are clearly early hints of “The Call of Cthulhu.” No one is possessed in “Cthulhu” but a swamp wizard seems a likely prototype for Old Castro. The voodoo scene is moved from Alabama to Louisiana. And there is no mistaking the antediluvian-cyclopean ruins in the Pacific as anything other than R’lyeh. And it is the center of a world-wide “witch cult.” We should not be surprised that Lovecraft would mix voodoo in with the witch cult. Donald Waugh has explored some of Lovecraft’s ideas about the witch-cult, which he identified (more than Murray) with obsolete notions of a squat-dark-skinned race in European prehistory. Lovecraft differentiates between cults in “The Call of Cthulhu,” but the ideas about voodoo and witch cults were blending together in his mind.

Another source for the voodoo-witchcraft connection in Lovecraft’s mind may have been the Salem witch trials. They appear numerous times in Lovecraft’s stories, and are the direct inspiration for Arkham. Arkham is basically Salem with Brown University thrown into it. In his antiquarian ramblings, HPL fixated on Salem, visiting several times, and seeking out the farmhouse and grave of the condemned Rebecca Nurse. He also visited the grave of Nathaniel Mather, who went to the grave feeling guilt over the events of 1692. Lovecraft blamed the witch-panic on Tituba, an enslaved West Indian woman central to early parts of the panic in Salem (HPL letter to Frank Belknap Long and Alfred Galpin, May 1, 1923, Published in Lovecraft 1965: 221, Letter 127; HPL letter to Robert E. Howard, October 4, 1930, Published in Lovecraft 1971: 176, Letter 428; HPL letter to Robert H. Barlow, March 19, 1934. Published in Lovecraft 1976a: 392 – 393, Letter 692).

While he chalks up much of the Salem panic to false accusations, he tells R. E. Howard that it sits atop the reality of the witch-cult. Lovecraft even followed in the footsteps of Charles Leland. After he had written “The Dunwich Horror,” Lovecraft was contacted by a woman claiming to be the descendant of Mary Easty, sister of Rebecca Nurse and another one of the women hanged at Salem. She hinted that there were indeed family secrets, and that her family was both derived from the murderous Borgias of Italy, and knew other witches in Marblehead. Yet she asks HPL if he knew more of secret witch-lore in New England, and whether Dunwich and Arkham were real places. The possibility of learning these secrets (shades of Aradia) thrilled Lovecraft, but we learn no more of this beyond a few letters (HPL letter to Clark Ashton Smith, March 22, 1929, Published in Lovecraft 1968: 327, Letter 350; HPL letter to Clark Ashton Smith, April 14, 1929, Published in Lovecraft 1968: 328, Letter 351; HPL letter to Robert H. Barlow, March 19, 1934. Published in Lovecraft 1976a: 392 – 393, Letter 692).

The Cthulhu Cult is a hidden ancient religion, surviving on the fringes of civilized society, and only detectable through diligent scholarly study. Just like Murray’s discovery of the witch cult through tying together scraps of archaeology and history with her study of witch trial testimonies. The two are not identical, but they clearly are close kin. This concept of a hidden occult undergirding to everyday reality becomes one of the most important hallmarks of the Cthulhu Mythos, alongside the cosmic horror powered by both Lovecraft’s emotional outlook and his interests in science. Cthulhu Mythos stories involve hidden occulted religions and knowledge only detectable to diligent scholars, but the joke is on everyone as the “god” of the cult turns out to be humanity’s insignificance and doom.

The success of marrying the witch-cult to the cosmic in “Cthulhu” continues in virtually all that follows. Murray’s book is specifically name-dropped in “The Horror at Red Hook,” “The Call of Cthulhu,” and “The Whisperer in Darkness.” Hints of the cult show up in later fiction, but never cleaving so closely to Murray’s hidden religion as the Cthulhu Cult. Witches or similar folk, part of dark and terrible magical lineages, appear in “Dreams in the Witch House,” “The Dunwich Horror,” and perhaps “The Thing on the Doorstep.” There are hints of this connection for “Dunwich” again in the Commonplace book, this time from 1925

130 N.E. region call’d “Witches’ Hollow”—along course of a river. Rumours of witches’ sabbaths and Indian powwows on a broad mound rising out of the level where some old hemlocks and beeches formed a dark grove or daemon-temple. Legends hard to account for. Holmes—Guardian Angel.
134 Witches’ Hollow novel? Man hired as teacher in private school misses road on first trip—encounters dark hollow with unnaturally swollen trees and small cottage (light in window?). Reaches school and hears that boys are forbidden to visit hollow. One boy is strange—teacher sees him visit hollow—odd doings—mysterious disappearance or hideous fate.

Arguably the most direct appearance of the cult was not on the printed page, but in Lovecraft’s dreams. On Halloween Night 1927, Lovecraft had an intensely immersive and detailed dream in which he was a Roman military commander leading troops against an ancient and evil cult of the Miri Nigri, the squat dark people of Lovecraft’s take on the cult (HPL letter to Frank Belknap Long, December, 1927, Published in Lovecraft 1968: 202 – 203, Letter 308). This cult took human sacrifices on the traditional pagan holy nights, and strikes terror into the local citizenry. If this sounds something like Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead/The 13th Warrior, don’t be surprised. The dream was discussed in HPL’s letters, which had been published a few years before Crichton wrote his story. It was incorporated in Frank Belknap Long’s “The Horror from the Hills” nearly verbatim. And Crichton cites Al Azif (the Necronomicon) in the faux bibliography of Eaters.

Murray’s ideas, part of a larger cultural meme of ancient survivals, secret societies, and pagan dreams and nightmares, birthed both a real religion of a healthy life of balance, and a pseudomythology of cosmic dread, both of which have thrived.

Works Cited

Adler, Margot
1986 Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America. Revised and Expanded Edition. Beacon Press, Boston.

Drower, Margaret S.
2004 Margaret Alice Murray, 1863 – 1963. In Breaking Ground: Pioneering Women Archaeologists, edited by Getzel M. Cohen and Martha Sharp Joukowsky, pp. 109 – 141.

Hutton, Ronald
1999 Modern Pagan Witchcraft. In Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, Volume 6: The Twentieth Century (v. 5), pp. 1 – 79, edited by Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark. In the series Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, series editors Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia.

Lovecraft, Howard Phillips
1926 The Call of Cthulhu. Reprinted in H. P. Lovecraft: The Fiction, Complete and Unabridged, pp. 355 – 379. Barnes & Noble, New York.
1965 Selected Letters: 1911 – 1924. Volume I. Edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei. Arkham House, Sauk City, Wisconsin
1971 Selected Letters: 1929-1931. Edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei. Volume III. Edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei. Arkham House, Sauk City, Wisconsin
1976a Selected Letters: 1932-1934". Volume IV. Edited by August Derleth and James Turner. Arkham House, Sauk City, Wisconsin

Murray, Margaret
1963 My first hundred years". William Kimber, London.

Waugh, Robert H.
1994 Dr. Margaret Murray and H. P. Lovecraft: The Witch-Cult in New England. Lovecraft Studies 31: 2 – 10

All the Myths are True (a little fun)

2010-10-11T22:29:00.005-05:00

One of my favorite songs over the last few years, and one eminently suited for the topics this site covers is Abney Park's "All the Myths are True." It's all about legends, monsters, lost cities, zombies and the like. They had me at "Scientists unearth enormous skeletons" You'll hear what I mean.

Now, you can listen to it with Abney Park's Electro-Mechanical Music Listening Machine. Just twist the dial until the song you want is lined up with the selector cog within the machine's face. Or the winding stem. It's a little cantankerous.

If you haven't guessed already, Abney Park is one of the music groups flying the steampunk flag. The band flies the H. M. S. Ophelia, on the lookout for zeppelin freighters to plunder, and dodging air krakens of the sort we covered over the last two years.

You can check more of their music (I loved their last album Aether Shanties, and they've got a new one coming out this week) and other sundry goods at their site or myspace.

Fantasies of Control: Government and Supernatural Fears

2010-10-04T16:07:00.000-05:00

Image by RadioKirik (Wikicommons)

A recent news item, and two book releases concerning UFOs and the US government, got me thinking about the concept of government reaction to claims of the paranormal.

According to a recent Freedom of Information disclosure from the Dyfed Powys police in Wales, UK. In the past five years, they've dealt with 86 calls concerning witches, as well as

"one call about a werewolf, seven about vampires, 19 about UFOs, 13 about big cats, 73 reports of ghosts, 16 of zombies, 35 of demons, five regarding big foot sightings, 33 of monsters and 18 about wizards"

One of the more cliched ideas in fantastical fiction is that of the government agency that polices the supernatural. While there are more fantastical examples in fiction, the most cliched version boils down to a secret organization, with an odd number or acronym in its name, that investigates and eliminates paranormal threats, often containing them in some fashion. I don't know what the earliest version of the concept is in either folklore or fiction, but by the 1980s it had already become something of a humerous trope (warning: link to addictive tvtropes site, where they call this is some variation on the Extranormal Institute and its subtype Secret Government Warehouse). Current examples include the MiB in the Men in Black Films, Warehouse 13 and Fringe on television, the B.P.R.D in comics, X-Com and Delta Green
in games, and amongst plenty of examples in print, Charles Stross' "The Laundry" (such as his recent The Fuller Memorandum).

More intriguing are the two sorts of groups that appear in both folklore and reporting in the real world. The UFO world in particular has had an obsession with government conspiracies and secret organizations for decades, crystallizing in the form of the Majestic documents, discredited in the eyes of many within and without of ufology. The original documents describe a high-level, shadow-cabinet of sorts, set up after various flying saucer crashes in the 1940s and early 1950s, but subsequent documents include operations manuals and other suggestions of active operations. The operations of Project Moon Dust and other government agencies (US and otherwise) to retrieve objects fallen from space have been brought into the larger UFO mythology. Such efforts, aimed at collecting and exploiting foreign military and aerospace technology, have been enmeshed into Majestic and other ufolore. Paranormal researcher Christopher O'Brien has suggested government or other secret special forces-style occult teams as explaining part of the patterns he finds in cattle mutilations, as he discusses with Greg Bishop on the podcast Radio Misterioso in January 2005. Like something out of the B.P.R.D., he suggests that copycat cattle mutilations may be rituals by such a group to counteract the activities of possibly non-human entities, ultramodern blood sacrifices to deal with ultraterrestrials, if you will.

As exciting as these ideas are, more documented paranormal task forces within government seem to be much less proactive, or active at all. The fall into one of two categories.

The first are those willing to use paranormal beliefs as psychological and propaganda weapons. Legends and supernatural beliefs, most famously Filipino vampire myth, have been used in combat, with mixed success. The CIA thought flying saucers made a great human interest story to flood the Guatemalan papers when their plans for a coup had been exposed, and also were happy for some UFO reports to continue when they were actually sightings of the U-2 and other spy planes (the Soviets made similar efforts regarding space launches). Mark Pilkington's recent book Mirage Men: An Adventure into Paranoia, Espionage, Psychological Warfare, and UFOs suggests that much of the UFO phenomenon can actually be chalked up to such intelligence activities. I have not read this book and cannot evaluate its claims. Arguably Project Bluebook would fall into this category. The very public US Air Force project was in reality a small operation based out of Ohio, and while it did occasionally conduct field investigations of UFO sightings, such as the Socorro, New Mexico landing or the Kelly-Hopkinsville goblin siege, scientific advisor J. Allen Hynek and others have made it clear that the office was primarily an effort to minimize public concerns and interest in UFOs, in keeping with the recommendations of the Robertson Panel.

The second type is intriguingly close to the fictional and more impressive folkloric concepts. Harold Blum's Out There: The Government's Secret Quest for Extraterrestrials suggested back in 1992 that there was an informal UFO study group composed of officers of the intelligence and military communities. Blum's findings would eventually be echoed by the work of Jon Ronson and others culminating in The Men Who Stare at Goats, including some of the same individuals and groups, as well as the release of information on Project Stargate, the CIA psychic/remote viewing project. Despite plenty of myth-making all around, there was clearly at least one set of officers within the military and intelligence establishment that pursued paranormal interests and studies. Similar projects have been declassified by the British Ministry of Defense.

So it is with both interest and skepticism that I mention the most recent high profile claim of an intra-governmental paranormal study and action group. Nick Redfern chronicles (I have listened to and read several discussions of Mr. Redfern's findings, including some on his blog for this book, but not the book itself) in FINAL EVENTS and the Secret Government Group on Demonic UFOs and the Afterlife the tale of a loose group that became convinced that UFOs are actually demonic in nature, and that the transformation of American society to a Christian fundamentalist culture is necessary to defend against these forces. This belief is persistent amongst a subset of UFO followers, and I believe it is growing. Given the public resurgence of the Christian right in recent years, and especially in the training and top-level conduct of the military and government, the concept is controversial but timely. I would like to see some of the evidence that such a group might exist, but its existence is eminently plausible. Just as eastern religious ideas influenced the individuals described in The Men Who Stare at Goats, we would expect more radical Christian ideas to be reflected by some in the power establishment, no matter what you think of those ideas.

All of these groups and efforts, real or imagined, are about control. A classic skeptical critique of conspiracy theory is that people unable to accept that an unruly world is chaotic, imagine secret controlling factions, placing events in someone's hands (even if they are sinister hands), belieinv that someone is in control. While I am a skeptic, I've never liked that idea much, it doesn't make a lot of sense either logically or from experience. Sure, we might feel more comforted if we believe that in the case of catastrophe, say an asteroid impact, that there is some super-secret organization which will spring into action and save us. But I don't see how belief in all-powerful conspiracies controlling the world to the detriment of the believer and society is terribly comforting. Instead, in many cases it seems, in my experience, that belief in a powerful evil conspiracy allows for belief in a powerful counterforce. The New World Order/Satan will rouse good patriots or Christians to battle in a final war and be victorious. Moral decay and oppression acts as a backdrop for enlightened consciousness and transformation into a New Age. This perhaps is comforting, not in imagining control in the hands of a conspiracy, but instead providing the believer with an enemy to fight, something to focus angst upon rather than ill-defined unease.

In the cases of psychological warfare and propaganda, control is the obvious goal. Here, the right words or symbols, including powerfully charged supernatural symbols, are hoped to magically bend a population's or an enemy's will, without the application of brute force physical violence. A push button society, controllable through manipulation, is a technocratic dream of the modern era, by the intelligence officer and the ad man alike.

And lastly, in the case of government paranormal action groups, control is indeed sought over an unruly world. The UFO phenomenon is believed to be maddeningly chaotic to many who study it, to the point that the "trickster" concept from anthropology and mythology has become a popular buzzword in the community. Likewise, parapsychology has a long history of fitful starts and stops, vague and problematic findings and methods, and lack of scientific progress. Individuals feeling as such, but with organizational power at their fingertips, have a tool to possibly control some of that chaos. On the other hand, such beliefs can be a key to understanding and controlling the logic of a chaotic world. Projects like Stargate, the remote viewing effort of the CIA, are shortcuts to hopefully better results than those obtained through traditional intelligence work.

Loveland Frog Festival, Saturday October 2

2010-09-30T21:43:00.008-05:00

This Saturday, the people of Loveland, Ohio will be celebrating the 3rd Annual Loveland Frog Festival, in honor of one of the weirder creature legends in the United States. Published reports vary widely, but in 1955 several sightings in the area of bug-eyed "trolls," as labeled by Loren Coleman in his Mothman and Other Curious Encounters, with sparking electrical equipment have become conflated with two separate reports from 1972 of a humanoid frog or lizard like creature.

In both years, even more dramatic reports of humanoids from the deep were reported in North America, in Indiana in 1955 (when a hand nearly grabbed an unfortunate swimmer in the Ohio River) and in 1972 in Thetis Lake Vancouver (which has largely been written off as a hoax). It has not escaped notice, especially in the Indiana case, that The Creature From the Black Lagoon had been released in theaters the previous year. Humanoid sightings in general were big in both years. In 1955, all sorts of sightings of odd humanoids were centered in the Ohio River valley (see Albert Rosales' 1955 entry in his compilation of humanoid sightings in the context of UFO lore). This was the same year that the infamous Kelly-Hopkinsville "goblin" UFO encounter occurred in Kentucky. No such wave occurred in 1972, but UFO sightings would skyrocket in 1973.

There is no real back story, that I'm aware of, to the Loveland Frog. The 1955 reports have been seen as possibly relating to UFO sightings, similar to the wave of humanoid reports in France in 1954. But no one has tried to stake out a taxonomy for the frog, claim it as part of some larger picture, or even suggest some Innsmouth folk moving out west. But this hasn't stopped the legend from growing into a festival, and a local football club.

I very briefly stopped in Loveland two years ago, in the area where the iconic sighting by Officer Ray Shockey (the second of the officers has since said he only saw an iguana) occurred.

Riverside Avenue, where the sighting took place

The Little Miami River in the area of Shockey's report

Spooky Dissertations Part 5: The Paranormal and Belief

2010-09-30T20:11:00.003-05:00

This is the final installment of the Spooky Dissertations miniseries.

Part 1 introduced the series and covered cryptozoology
Part 2 explored the increasingly popular topic of UFO culture
Part 3 finished off the UFO topic and included the larger context of Theosophy
Part 4 examined ghost culture and parapsychology

Finally in part 5, we conclude with a general overview and miscellaneous of paranormal culture, largely but not exclusively falling under the rubric of "the occult" (though as noted, I've been fairly limited in what goes here, so as not to replicate the vast literature on anthropology of magic and religion). We then have a number of belief-oriented more quantitative studies of belief in psychic powers, and general paranormal beliefs and thought processes.

I will add to this when any new dissertations and theses on any of these topics comes to my attention, and if you know of one, feel free to leave a comment.

Paranormal Culture

Libraries and the Occult – 2004 MA, Cecile Dubuis, University College London

Industrial light and magic: Popular science, technology, and the occult in the late Victorian period – 2003 PhD, Sylvia Amy Pamboukian, Indiana University

Spectral realities: Intersections of science and the occult in modern American literature – 2003 PhD, Stephanie Lee Hawkins, State University of New York at Buffalo

Faith by demonstration: The connection between the history of paranormal phenomena and a New Age spirituality – 2003 PhD, Sonja C. St. Amant, State University of New York at Albany

Rhetorics of darkness: Modern occultism and the popular imaginary - 2002 PhD, Joshua Gresham Gunn, University of Minnesota

Wonder shows: Science, religion, and magic on the American stage, 1845-2001 - 2002 PhD, Fred Robert Nadis, University of Texas – Austin

Multiple views of multiple realities: The rhetorical and social construction of the occult - 2000 PhD, John Dale Richards, Ohio University

H. Rider Haggard and the Victorian occult – 2000 PhD, Janet Elizabeth McIntire, Northeastern University

Avatars of the soul: Cultures of science, medicine, and the occult in modern Germany - 1999 PhD, Corinna Adele Treitel, Harvard University

The significance of the near-death experience in Western cultural traditions – 1999 MA, Alan J. Pew, California State University, Dominguez Hills (DASH)

Psychics, readers, visionaries and other paranormal personalities: A social movement analysis of “gifted” people in the metaphysical movement – 1999 PhD, Gary A. Steward, Jr., Oklahoma State University

Witchcraft and occult crime within a contemporary Canadian context – 1999 MA, Tracesandra Jade McDonald, University of Ottawa

The profession of brujeria on spiritual entrepreneurship in Puerto Rico – 1998 PhD, Raquel Romberg, University of Pennsylvania

Dark star rising: The emergence of modern occultism, 1800-1950 – 1997 PhD, Bradford J. M. Verter, Princeton University

Places of power: sacred sites, Gaia's pilgrims, and the politics of landscape. An interpretive study of the geographics of New Age and contemporary earth spirituality, with reference to Glastonbury, England, and Sedona, Arizona – 1997 PhD, Adrian Iwachiw, York University (Canada) (DASH)

Identifying the spiritual experience – 1996 PhD, Sara Horsfall, Texas A&M University

Belief, Explanation and Rhetoric in the Crop Circle Phenomenon of Southern England – 1991 MA, Bruce Lionel Mason, Memorial University of Newfoundland (PUFOI)

Mysticism: A comparative historical study – 1988 PhD, Jess Byron Hollenbeck, University of California, Los Angeles

Spiritism and science in Brazil: An anthropological interpretation of religion and ideology – 1987 PhD, David John Hess, Cornell University

Otherworld journeys: A comparative study of medieval Christian and contemporary accounts of near-death experience. (afterlife, visions, imagination) – 1984 PhD, Carol Goldsmith Zaleski, Harvard University

Irrationality in current American culture – 1983 PhD, Kathleen Ann Dempsey, Saint Louis University

The new transcendentalism in post-industrial society: life styles and the search for meaning in the New Age – 1980 PhD, Gloria Ann Young, The University of Texas at Austin

Belief and Psychology – General Paranormal

Development of an instrument to measure understanding of the nature of science as a process of inquiry in comparison to pseudoscience – 2008 MS, Brighton Oothoudt, California State University, Long Beach

From Bigfoot in the backyard to ghosts in the attic: Predictors of paranormal belief – 2010 MA, Jeff Tranguch, West Virginia University

Psychological processes in perceived paranormal phenomena- 2008 MA, Stephanie Ann Van Arsdall, California State University, Fresno (UFOs vs. Bigfoot)

Psychopathological symptoms and their relation to paranormal belief and illusory judgment – 2006 PhD, Michael P. Cofrin, University of New Hampshire

Attributional style and irrational beliefs as related to para-psychological belief – 2004 Psy.D, Jennifer I. Millman, Hofstra University

The relationship between paranormal beliefs and the personality trait Openness to Experience: A comparison of psychology majors with students in other disciplines- 2003 PhD, Eric Dogan Ozkan, Central Michigan University

Information seeking and interest in the paranormal: Towards a process model of information action – 2001 PhD, Jarkko Teuvo Johan Kari, Tampereen Teknillinen Korkeakoulu (Finland)

Paranormal beliefs: Developmental antecedents, perceived control, and defensive coping – 2001 PhD, Stefanie L. Perkins, Long Island University, the Brooklyn Center

Belief and reasoning: The effects of beliefs on syllogistic reasoning – 1999 PhD, Mary Merla-Ramos, Long Island University, The Brooklyn Center

The influence of religious affiliation and religious orientation on beliefs in science, religion and the paranormal – 1998 PhD, Brigham Young University

The relationship of ego identity status and ego development stage to a belief in paranormal phenomena in Puerto Rican females – 1993 PhD, Rosie Rodriguez, New York University

The structure and correlates of metaphysical beliefs among a sample of behaviorally committed participants – 1993 PhD, Richard Peter Kaczynski, Wayne State University

The pseudoscientific beliefs of high school students – 1992 Ed.D., Duane Starrett Nickell, Indiana University

A description of the paranormal beliefs of preservice teachers at Indiana University – 1991 PhD, Robert Martin Craig, Indiana University

The influence of undergraduate research methods and statistics courses on the transfer of reasoning skills to everyday events, and belief in the paranormal – 1990 MA, Davina Mill, Concordia University

The Relationships Among the Experience of the Dying, the Experience of Paranormal Events, and Creativity in Adults – 1987 PhD, Mary Dee McEvoy, New York University

An Investigation of the Empirical Relationships Among Beliefs in Science, Religion, and the Paranormal – 1985 PhD, Carl Ben Taylor, Brigham Young University

Beliefs in paranormal phenomena: Their relationship to involvement in esoteric practices and locus of control – 1979 PhD, James Joseph McGarry, Kent State University

Belief and Psychology – Psychic Powers

Paranormal belief, personality traits, and subjective well-being - 2010 PhD, Inga Simonian, Alliant International University

Illusory judgments under conditions of uncertainty: Reasoning errors related to paranormal and religious beliefs - 2008 PhD, Erin C. Goforth, University of New Hampshire

Critical Thinking Ability, Dogmatism, Ambiguity Tolerance and Belief in Paranormal – 1987 PhD, Michael James Nanko, United States International University

Childhood Development and Personality Functioning of the Psychic (Parapsychology, Hypnosis, Multiple) – 1985 PhD, Mark Howard Goldenthal, Georgia State University

Interrelationships among belief in psychic abilities, psychic experiences, and sensation-seeking – 1982 PhD, James Stephen Anthony, United States International University

Personality Variables Associated with Response in Dissonant Situations – 1981 PhD, Caren Rae Gertner, The University of Texas at Austin

Spooky Dissertations Part 4: Ghost Culture and Parapsychology

2010-09-29T15:10:00.001-05:00

We've previously had bibliographies of dissertations and theses on cryptozoology, UFO culture, and a grab bag of other UFO topics with an emphasis on the past. Today we take a look at studies of ghost culture, spiritualism and parapsychology, and actual paranormal research. Tomorrow, we conclude with works on general belief in the paranormal.

Ghost Culture

Never Give Up the Ghost: An Analysis of Three Edinburgh Ghost Tour Companies - 2005 MA, Joy Fraser, Memorial University of Newfoundland

Gothic Realities: The Emergence of Cultural Forms through Representations of the Unreal - 2005 PhD, Lawrence Andrew Cooper, Jr, Princeton University

Visions of an unseen world': the production and consumption of English ghost stories, c.1660-1800 – PhD 2005, Sasha Handley, University of Warwick (DASH)

Possessions: The history and uses of haunting in the Hudson Valley – 2001 PhD, Judith Ann Richardson, Harvard University

Specters of war: An analysis of ghost stories and other stories of the occult set in the American Civil War – 1994 MA, Maureen Rush Bradley, University of Hawai’i

Aspects of supernatural belief, memorate and legend in a contemporary urban environment – 1985 PhD, Gillian Bennett, University of Sheffield

Spiritualism

The commercialization of the afterlife: Spiritualism's supernatural economy, 1848—1900 – 2010 MA, Richard W. Fink, II

Ventriloquising the dead: representations of Victorian spiritualism and psychical research in selected nineteenth and late twentieth century fiction – 2006 PhD, Tatiana Kontou, University of Sussex (DASH)

Rei(g)ning mediums: Spiritualism and social controls in 19th-century American literature – 2006 PhD, Mitzi Schrag, University of Washington

Sacred conspiracies: Spiritualist and occult politics in Britain, 1843 – 1916 – 2005 PhD, William J. Dotson, The University of Chicago

Automatic writing: A history from Mesmer to Breton – 2004 PhD, Diane Dearmont, University of Washington

Materialisation Phenomena in British and French Spiritualism and Psychical Research – 2004 PhD, Corinne Montenon, University of Birmingham (DASH)

"I saw it with my own eyes": An ethnography of visions and other anomalous phenomena among participants in Candomble, Umbanda and Spiritism from Rio de Janeiro and Abadiania, Goias – 2002 PhD, Yves Marton, University of California, Los Angeles

Without crucible or scalpel: A sympathetic history of American Spiritualism - 2002 PhD, Robert Sayre Cox, University of Michigan

Feminine channeling: Technology, the occult, and women's mediation of communications, 1870—1915 – 2001 PhD, Jill Nicole Galvan, University of California, Los Angeles

'Fifty-cent sybils': Occult workers and the symbolic marketplace in the urban United States, 1850-1930, - 1998 PhD, Tammy Lee Stone-Gordon, Michigan State University

Soft murder by the camera eye: Photographic fears and the Victorian writer – 1992 PhD, Nancy Martha West, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Spiritualism and psychology in the works of Robert and Elizabeth Browning and Henry and William James – 1991 PhD, Charles Lloyd Meredith, University of Cambridge

Subversive spirit: women and nineteenth century spiritualism – 1987 PhD, A. Owen, University of Sussex

A harmony of worlds: spiritualism and the quest for community in nineteenth-century America – PhD 1981, Michael Anthony O’Sullivan, University of Southern California

Parapsychology and Science

To the Summerland: William James, psychical research and modernity – 2003 PhD, Krister Dylan Knapp, Boston College

"The coping stone on psycho-analysis": Freud, psychoanalysis, and the Society for Psychical Research – 2002 PhD, James P. Keeley, Columbia University

Fantasies of transmission: Psychical research and the mediation of intimacy, 1880 – 1916 – 1998 PhD, Pamela N. Thurschwell, Cornell University

Interpretations of quantum physics, the mystical and the paranormal: Einstein, Schroedinger, Bohr, Pauli and Jordan – 1989 PhD, Peter Anton Degen, Drew University

The penumbra of science: A sociological investigation of the debate between parapsychology and science – 1988 PhD, Catherine Boyd Withers, York University (Canada)

Deviant Science: The Case of Parapsychology – 1981 PhD, James Maris McClenon, University of Maryland College Park

Paranormal Research

Field notes from the light: An ethnographic study of the meaning and significance of "near-death experiences" – 2007 PhD, Laura Suzanne Gordon, University of Maryland, College Park (DASH)

Moments of transcendence: A psychospiritual interpretation of psychic, conversion, and mystical experiences – 1998 M.Ed., Marie H. Bousquet, Acadia University

Beyond the near-death experience: An investigation of the effects of near-death experiences – 1996 PsyD, Patricia H. Carr, Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology (DASH)

L'épreuve de la preuve. La photographie et le phénomène des ovnis - 1994 MA(?), Jean-Phillipe Dain, Université Paris VIII, UFR Arts - Dep. Image Photographique (EUROUFO)

Event horizons of the psyche: Synchronicity, psychedelics, and the metaphysics of consciousness – 1993 PhD, David Bruce Albert, Jr., University of California, Riverside

The social dialogue of the near-death experience – 1992 PhD, Liane Gail Pedersen-Gallegos, University of Colorado at Boulder

The Relevance of Philosophy to Psychical Research: A Critical Examination of Claims and Methods – 1988 PhD, John Anthony Lord, University of Surrey

Archaeology and parapsychology – 1976 MA, Constance C. Cameron, California State University, Fullerton

An Investigation of the relationship between paranormal phenomena and altered states of consciousness – 1975 PhD, Justin Donald Fair, United States International University

Spooky Dissertations Part 3: Ancient Aliens, Theosophy, and the Science of Belief

2010-09-28T12:56:00.007-05:00

Over the last two days we've had listings of dissertations and theses on cryptozoology, and on UFO culture. Today is a shorter list, combining several topics. Two of these explore the relationship between more mystical folkore and UFOs or ET's. Some of these topics are covered in the larger UFO culture bibliography yesterday, but these narrower works get their own listing here. The similarity between fairylore and UFO lore has been recognized for decades, whereas the recognition of roots of much of UFO-lore in theosophy and related beliefs has largely been ignored. Even obvious cases, such as the Shaver mysteries, end up getting more absorbed into the weird field of UFOs rather than suggesting UFOs are just an atomic age version of theosophy. But with the explosion in ancient astronaut beliefs, this becomes really apparent.

Also up today are sociological and psychological studies on the nature of UFO belief. In addition to this we have a persistent subfield looking at anomalous events or structures in the brain and anomalous experiences. While the results of this field of work have been used to suggest many different culturally-determined experiences may be the result of explainable temporal lobe or other activity, this has been particularly contentious when offered as a partial explanation for alien abduction accounts, and so I have put it here.

Over the next two days, we will conclude with cultural studies of ghost experiences and ghost stories, the history and conduct of parapsychology, spiritualism, and a slew of works on psychic powers and paranormal beliefs in general.

Fairy Folklore and UFO Lore

The otherworld vessel as metatraditional motif in northern European literature and folk narrative – 2009 PhD, Kimberly Ball, University of California, Irvine

Comparing stories of extraterrestrials with stories of fairies – 2003 MLA, David Harl Hinson, The University of North Carolina at Asheville

Shamanism and alien abductions: A comparative study – 2000 MA, Simon Brian Harvey-Wilson, Edith Cowan University (PUFOI)

L’irrationnel et ses habitants - A deux periodes distinctes de l’histoire: les OVNI au XXeme siecle et les fees, les lutins, le diable et la mort du XV au XVIIIeme siecle - 1992 MA(?), Christophe Campiglia, Université de Nantes (France) (EUROUFO)

Theosophy and Ancient Aliens

Constructions of Mythology: Mount Shasta, Atlantis, and the Ancient Lemurians - 2006 MA, Tiffany Darlene Strickland, California State University, Fullerton

A world according to Pana-Wave Laboratory: An extreme response to globalization in Japan – 2005 PhD, Salvador Jimenez Murguia, University of California, Santa Barbara

Theosophy, culture, and empire - 2000 PhD, Matthew Mulligan Goldstein, University of Texas – Austin

The SS-Ahnenerbe and the 1938/1939 German-Tibet expedition – 2000 MA, Mark Jonathan Rogers, Georgia State University

The urban gothic in British fantastic fiction, 1880—1930 – 1987 PhD, Kathleen Louise Spencer, University of California, Los Angeles

The archaeology and geoglyphs of Nazca, Peru, or, The extraterrestrial foundations of Andean civilization – 1985 PhD, Persis Banvard Clarkson, University of Calgary

Belief and Psychology – UFOs

Psychological correlates of the UFO abduction experience: The role of beliefs and indirect suggestions on abduction accounts obtained during hypnosis – 1998 PhD, Duncan Jon Andrew Day, Concordia University

Belief in UFOs and alien abduction phenomena as a function of paranormal beliefs, fantasy proneness, dissociative experience, and psychological adjustment – 1994 MA, Kevin M. Harkins, Bridgewater State University, Massachusetts (PUFOI)

Témoignage d'OVNI et psychologie de la perception - 1994 PhD, Manuel Jeménez, Université Paul Valery, Montpellier (France) (EUROUFO)

Factors influencing attitudes toward controversial research: Quantitatively disentangling the social from the scientific (consensus in science) – 1994 PhD, Mark John Rodeghier, The University of Illinois at Chicago

Personality Characteristics on the MMPI, 16PF, and ACL of Persons Who Claim UFO Experiences – 1986 PhD, June Parnell, University of Wyoming

The Relationship of Anomie and Externality to Strength of Belief in Unidentified Flying Objects - 1975 MA, Stephen P. Resta, Loyola College, Baltimore (PUFOI)

Neuroscience and the Paranormal

Numinous-like auras and spirituality in persons with focal seizures – 2008 PhD, Rima Dolgoff-Kaspar, City University of New York

Isolated sleep paralysis and its associations with anxiety sensitivity, history of trauma, paranormal beliefs, and life stress in a black sample – 2005 PhD, Holly Joy Ramsawh, Boston University

Volatile spirits: An ecopsychological perspective on experiences of paranormal assault in contemporary America - 2001 PhD, Tina Rae Fields, California Institute of Integral Studies

The prevalence of sleep paralysis and temporal lobe lability in persons who report alien abduction - 1995 PhD, Marcus Cox, University of the West of England, Bristol, United Kingdom (EUROUFO)

Temporal lobe soft signs as indicators of fantasy proneness – 1993 MA, Scott Probst, Simon Fraser University

Differentiation of uncommon beliefs as a function of the proficiency of interhemispheric processing – 1992 MA, Ross J. Skirda, Laurentian University of Sudbury

An investigation of the relationship between subjective paranormal experience and temporal lobe symptomatology – 1979 M.Med., Vernon Michael Neppe, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

Spooky Dissertations Part 2: UFO Culture

2010-09-26T21:37:00.009-05:00

Last time, after an introduction we had a bibliography of dissertations and theses concerned with the culture and psychology of cryptozoology and monsters, as well as a handful of works on supernatural narratives.

Today we have one of two posts on UFOs and aliens. This first is solely for studies of UFO culture, examining the communities and beliefs surrounding flying saucers and ETs. As before, if I was directed to a work by one of the other dissertation listings mentioned in the first post, I have noted this at the end of the entry.

Studies of UFO culture follow a certain trajectory, chronologically. With the exception of one early journalism master's thesis in the earliest years of the flying saucer era, academia has no interest in the topic for over 20 years. After the Condon report declares UFOs of no significant interest and the Air Force officially ends Blue Book and other interest in the topic, the floodgates open, and it is alright to study UFO organizations and beliefs from a sociological perspective or as folklore. More generally this is the time when it starts to become more acceptable to study more pop and other non-mainstream culture, and to examine Western culture with a more critical eye. Within ufology, this era has a decidedly Fortean bent, ending with the rise of crashed saucer legends at the end of the 1970s.

With the shift towards more conspiratorial in ufology, in the US at least, there is less academic interest. But with the 1990s, studies of UFO culture multiply dramatically. It seems likely that the success of Communion and the books of Bud Hopkins have something to do with that, as abduction becomes an extremely ripe cultural studies topic by the end of the decade, though it recedes in popularity by the middle of the 2000s. By this time, the academic approach is to either see the UFO as symbolic of millennial angst and the problematic transition at the end of the Cold War, or to examine the UFO as not a source of folklore or a scientific puzzle, but the font of new religions.

Tomorrow, a somewhat shorter list focusing on aliens and the past, as well as the biology of anomalous experiences.

UFO Culture

Dallas, Roswell, Area 51: A social history of American "conspiracy tourism" – 2010 PhD, Shelley E. McGinnis, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Flying Saucer Culture: An Historical Survey of American UFO Belief – 2006 PhD, Dean Bertram, University of Sydney (DASH)

How the alien invaded the American mind: a history of experts, entrepreneurs, story-tellers, and a love of the alien in modern American culture – 2006 PhD, Zoe Couacaud, University of Sydney (DASH)

Tensions, synthesis and spirituality in the Norwegian UFO movement, especially exemplified by the world outlook of the organization NETI - 2005 PhD, Jan Bertil Heilund, University of Bergen, Norway (EUROUFO)

The Flight of the Ordinary: Narrative, Poetics, Power and UFOs in the American Uncanny - 2005 PhD, Susan Lepselter, University of Texas – Austin

The "Rael" World. Narratives of the Raelian Movement - 2005 MA, Tayah L. Hanson, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon (EUROUFO)

Mon Dieu... un ovni...: du phénomène ovni à ses dérives religieuses, en France de 1950 à nos jours - 2005 MA, Jérémy Morel, Université Jean Moulin (Lyon, France) (EUROUFO)

UFO-Hysterie in den USA - Ein interdisziplinäres Phänomen zwischen Wissenschaft, Politik, Religion und Kommerz - 2005 MA, Sandra Kemerle, Institut für Amerikanistik, Universität Leipzig (EUROUFO)

Weather-Workers, Saucer Seekers, and Orthoscientists: Epistemic Authority in Central Mexico - 2004 PhD, Ryan Cook, University of Chicago

SETI science: Managing alien narratives – 2004 PhD, Arthur C. Fricke, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Controversias tecnocientíficas y medios de comunicación: el caso de la clonación humana y los raëlianos en El País - 2004 PhD, Miguel Alcíbar Cuello, Universidad de Sevilla, Spain (EUROUFO)

Valores, símbolos y representaciones en una experiencia de contacto extraterrestre: el Grupo Aztlán - 2003 PhD, Ignacio Cabria, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (EUROUFO)

An Alien in Roswell – 2002 MA, Kay Lang, University of Wyoming

Social Constructionist, Psychological, and Official Theories of UFOs - 2002 MA, Alan Greenhalgh, California State University, Dominguez Hills

UFO and Alien Encounter Narratives: A Cross-Cultural Analysis - 2002 MA, Ravi Ramkisoonsingh, Carleton University

Alien encounters: A close analysis of personal accounts of extraterrestrial experiences – 2002 MA, Krista Suhr Henriksen, Simon Fraser University

Taken: Constructions of 'Race', 'Biology' and Colonialism in Alien Abduction Narrative in the United States – 2001 PhD, Carol Suzanne Matthews, University of Kansas (PUFOI)

Biblical analysis of the UFO/Alien Abduction phenomenon with possible implications for end times deception - 2001 D. Min. - Robert C. Hendrix, Northwest Graduate School of the ministry, Redmond, Washington (EUROUFO)

The Terror is Real. The history and politics of alien abduction – 2001 PhD, Bridget M. Brown, New York University

Pop Culture and the UFO Narrative: Who's Buying it, Who's Selling it, and Who's not Telling it - 2001 MA, Kelly S. Rubbo, Utah State University

Approche sociologique complexe du charisme - Le Mouvement Raëlien et son prophète - 2001 PhD, Annie Chatelin, Université de Perpignan

A Confederacy of Faith and Fact: UFO Research and the Search for Other Worlds - 2000 PhD, Anne Boyle Cross, Yale University

Supposed Science, Alleged Fiction: Distortion Patterns in the Transmission, of Cultural Paradigms, in the Twentieth Century - 2000 PhD, Andres Zlotsky, State University of New York – Buffalo

UFOCRITIQUE: UFOs, Social Intelligence, and the Condon Committee – 2000 MS, Diana Palmer Hoyt, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

New Religious UFO Movements: Extraterrestrial Salvation in Contemporary America – 2000 MA, Stefan Isaakson, California State University, Fresno (GREENWOOD)

The myth of communion: A rhetorical analysis of the narratives of alien abductees – 1999 PhD, Stephanie M. Kelley, University of Kansas (PUFOI)

A dialética do real e do imaginário. Uma proposta de interpretação do Fenômeno OVNI – 1999 MA, Cláudio Tsuyoshi Suenaga, Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP), Assis, Brasil (PUFOI)

The Lure of the Edge: Science, Religion, and the Alien Abduction Movement - 1998 PhD, Brenda Denzler, Duke University

Shaman and Abductee: American Ufology as Cryptoscience and Countersociology - 1998 MA, Ryan Cook, University of Chicago (EUROUFO)

Heaven's Gate: A Sociological Perspective - 1998 MA, Patricia L. Goerman, University of Virginia (EUROUFO)

Pulp science: Race, gender, and prediction in contemporary American culture – 1997 PhD, Beth Anne Loffreda, Rutgers The State University of New Jersey - New Brunswick

"Alien abductees'" Reports of worldview reconstruction (assumptive world theory, coping) – 1997 PsyD, Mindy Sue Kopolow, Antioch University New England Graduate School (PUFOI)

Pasts and futures: Space, history, and Armenian identity, 1988 – 1994 – 1995 PhD, Stephanie Semple Platz, The University of Chicago

Brothers from the sky: Myth and reality in a flying saucer group (Unarius, cults, colllective behavior) – 1995 PhD, Diana Jean Tumminia, University of California, Los Angeles

Otherworld Journeys: UFO Abduction Narratives as Transformative Stories - 1995 MA, Carol Suzanne Matthews, University of Kansas (EUROUFO)

UFO Stories: The Poetics of Uncanny Encounters in a Counterpublic Discourse – 1994 MA, Susan Lepselter, University of Texas (PUFOI)

Gods from the Machines: On the Anthropology of Alien Abductions - 1994 MA, Michael Tracy Blair, Washington State University (EUROUFO)

A social psychological investigation of UFO sighters – 1992 MA, Patricia Ann Cross, Carleton University

Personality characteristics and self-identified experiences of individuals reporting possible abduction by unidentified flying objects (UFOs) – 1992 PhD, Jo Stone-Carmen, United States International University

Flying saucers and the new angelology: Mythic projection of the Cold War and the convergence of opposites – 1990 PhD, Robert Pearson Flaherty, University of California, Los Angeles

Une secte soucoupique : les raëliens - 1989 MA, F. Follmer, Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier III (EUROUFO)

OVNI : un tabou scientifique? - 1988 MA, Véronique Galzy, Montpellier III (EUROUFO)

The UFO debate: A study of a contemporary legend – 1988 PhD, Linda Jean Milligan, The Ohio State University

The UFO Movement: A Sociological Study of UFO Groups – 1985 MA, Shirley McIver, The University of York (United Kingdom) (DASH)

The Boundaries of Orthodoxy: A Folkloric Look at the “UFO Phenomenon” – 1984 PhD, Peter Michael Rojcewicz, University of Pennsylvania

Mysteries in the eye of the beholder: UFOs and their correlates as a folkloric theme past and present – 1982 PhD, Thomas Eddie Bullard, Indiana University

Politicking and Paradigm Shifting: James E. McDonald and the UFO Case Study – 1975 PhD, Paul Edward McCarthy, University of Hawaii (GREENWOOD)

Organizational Goals and Support-Seeking Behavior: A Comparative Study of Social Movement Organizations in the UFO (Flying Saucer Fields) – 1973 PhD, Michael K. Schutz, Northwestern University

The controversy over unidentified flying objects in America: 1896-1973 – 1973 PhD, David Michael Jacobs, The University of Wisconsin – Madison

The UFO Phenomenon: A Study in Public Relations – 1972 MA, David J. Shea, University of Denver, Colorado (GREENWOOD)

A survey of press coverage of unidentified flying objects, 1947 – 1966 – 1970 PhD, Herbert Joseph Strentz, Northwestern University (GREENWOOD)

Flying Saucers: Fact or Fiction? – 1950 MA, DeWayne B. Johnson, University of California, Los Angeles (GREENWOOD)

Spooky Dissertations Part 1: Supernatural Narrative and Cryptozoology

2010-09-26T15:40:00.008-05:00

I'm starting a multipart series this week, listing academic doctoral dissertations and master's theses on spooky topics. Doctoral dissertations are important research documents and sources, but they have limitations.

On the problematic side, research design may be limited by substantial funding issues, cooperation within a larger project, and time constraints of the graduate school. A research proposal is typically drafted when the researcher is fresh out of (or still in) graduate classes, and for the duration of the project, and due to the proposal structure, research design or scope may not be able to take full advantage of discoveries made during the research. And while dissertations are not copy-edited or otherwise worked over outside of the review process.

On the good side, dissertations often are the most complete version of methods, theory, findings, and especially data from scientific and scholarly research. Transcripts, data tables, and other sources of information may be in appendices taking up hundreds of pages, material that would almost never be published when the research is turned into a book, and certainly not found in journal articles.

Dissertations and theses are both more and less accessible than published materials. Mike Dash discusses several of the sources for these works. Some schools do not participate in online catalogs and services (the most important being ProQuest/UMI), but most in the United States and several other countries do. They will print a copy, or provide a pdf, of a dissertation or thesis for a moderate fee in comparison to academic books, but somewhat more than typical hardback mass market prices. University libraries may either own physical copies, or pay for access to these databases, allowing members to read electronic versions in pdf or other format. Some authors have recently taken to offering their dissertations or theses to the public for free via the internet, so it is worth searching if you are interested in a particular topic. And many of the dissertations will be turned into commercially published books, often in small runs mostly for university libraries and others in the same field, so look for the author's name.

These sources can provide substantial high-quality research into paranormal or other spooky topics. But many of these studies do not conform to the popular image of "paranormal investigation," and instead can be broken down into four basic groups

- Cultural and historical studies. By far the most common, these studies approach topics such as spiritualism or UFOs as they would kinship networks or religions, with the tools of anthropology, sociology, history, and other fields of the social sciences and humanities. Researchers may conduct ethnographic research, living or working for long periods of time with communities under study. Or they may examine historical documents, artifacts, and artwork to understand past ideas and social movements in regard to these topics. Sometimes the researcher is either an adherent to such ideas, or at least receptive to them. But in many cases, the silence on this issue signals a broad-based skepticism, or lack of concern on whether the beliefs have merit as more than cultural constructs. Two topics to be covered over the next few posts, UFOs and Spiritualism, have been particular foci of cultural and historical studies.

- Psychological belief studies. These works utilize the tools of sociology and psychology (surveys, interviews, psychological testing) for more quantitative study. They are also arguably or least more openly skeptical of paranormal claims, more willing to investigate causes such as social status, gender, ethnicity, as well as more specific psychological factors, as possible reasons. While both cultural and psychological studies often relate religion to paranormal beliefs, this is a more bedrock principle in psychological studies. Such studies very commonly mix and match spooky topics along with conspiracy theory, religious concepts, and other beliefs, but more focused studies have shown some particular interest in psychic abilities and alien abduction.

- Neuroscience experience studies. A subset of the previous category, there is a small but focused interest on explaining anomalous experiences as a result of temporal lobe or other effects in the human brain. This field has shown particular interest in alien abduction and other supernatural assault traditions.

- Direct paranormal investigation. This is by far the rarest category, with only a handful of examples. Most of them involve near death experiences, studying those who claim them. The NDE studies extend beyond neuroscience, and include interviews and other study methods, and are arguably a direct attempt to explain these experiences. Otherwise, academic research on direct "evidence" for paranormal claims beyond testimonies is extremely rare, especially at the graduate project level.

I am not the first to make such a list. Barry Greenwood, Mike Dash, EuroUFO, and Portuguese UFO Investigation have similar lists. For sources discovered in those lists, I have noted the secondary source. While this list is not comprehensive, and I welcome pointers to other sources, neither is it completely inclusive. I have examined either the works themselves, or at least the abstracts, for most on this list (on some occasions I am familiar with a later published work by the author that incorporates the doctoral work).

I have not included for the most part studies that are primarily focused on literature, film, or other art. If literature and art are being used alongside other information to explore historical and cultural context, this may be considered, but not studies focused primarily on fictional media as the end goal of the research. I have also at times passed over works from religiously, ideologically, or otherwise motivated institutions that would have substantial principles in conflict with a very basic materialist and deductive approach to scholarship and science. You can't please everyone.

Lastly, cultural studies of non-Western religious or magical topics, or pre-19th century such topics in Europe and the Americas, have largely not been listed. There are at least tens of thousands of studies in anthropology, history and related fields on religion, magic, and witchcraft. If one of these topics is investigated through the prism of beliefs more generally considered to be parapsychological in nature, or otherwise related to the spooky paradigm, they have been included. Likewise, studies of legendary and supernatural creatures and spirits have not been included unless they are explicitly tied to modern belief structures in the Western, industrial, or post-industrial worlds (ie., no studies of vampire folklore unless it is tied to modern beliefs in real vampires). While this may seem like something of a hedge, most people don't generally consider beliefs like, for example, Aztec blood sacrifice, as being in the same boat as psychic powers. Even if one is skeptical of both, there is usually not a concern with proving that the 16th century Aztec beliefs are not correct.

After that somewhat lengthy introduction, we'll begin with a short batch of material on several subjects. The following posts will be on much more academically popular subjects, with lengthier lists. All lists are not in a standard bibliographic format, but are instead chronologically ordered, as I believe certain intellectual trends do manifest themselves.

Supernatural and Narrative

These studies examine the structure and rhetoric of testimonies, beliefs, and tales of the paranormal and supernatural or legendary entities.

Narrative Theory and Fort Berthold’s Stories of the Paranormal or Supernatural – 2009 PhD, Waylon C. Baker, University of North Dakota

The search for generic possibility in discourses of the implausible: Creating space for believers in a skeptical world. – 2007 PhD, Matthew David Petrunia, University of New Mexico

(Telling) Tales of the Unexpected: A Sociological Analysis of Accounts of Paranormal Experiences – 1989 D.Phil., Robin Christopher Wooffitt, The University of York (United Kingdom)

Cryptozoology Culture

These works examine stories of monsters and other mystery animals as cultural phenomena. Apparently cryptozoology is of little interest to cultural studies, in comparison with the lists of UFO, Spiritualist, psychic, and other topics we will soon see. Interestingly, unlike these other topics, commercially published academic books on cryptozoology culture outnumber dissertations and theses, something not seen for the other topics.

Discovering Chessie: Waterfront, regional identity, and the Chesapeake Bay sea monster, 1960-2000 – 2007 PhD, Eric A. Cheezum, University of South Carolina (DASH)

The Honey Island Swamp Monster: The Development and Maintenance of a Folk and Commodified Belief Tradition - 2003 MA, Frances Leary, Memorial University of Newfoundland

Cryptozoology Research

An application of speech processing techniques to recordings of purported bigfoot vocalizations to estimate physical parameters – 1978 MS, Lasse Hertel, University of Wyoming

Belief and Psychology – Cryptozoology

Warren's 1980 study compares legendary monsters and religious figures in the belief of children, and unsurprisingly, finds that pre-adolescent boys are more likely to believe in Bigfoot and other monsters than in traditional religious figures.

Beliefs in and experiences with sasquatch and corresponding coping strategies – 2009 MA, Mark Banta, University of Central Oklahoma

An investigation of children's beliefs in transcendent figures – 1980 PhD, John Frank Warren, III – Duke University

Tomorrow, we will review the studies of UFOs

Christine O'Donnell and the Satanic Altar: A Follow Up on Fears of Occult Ritual Scenes

2010-09-18T18:34:00.003-05:00

Previously, I have discussed the folk forensic archaeology of occult ritual scenes, the material culture of religious and cultural beliefs fearful of witchcraft and Satanism. Often stereotyped as being an 80s thing in America and the Anglophone media sphere, identifications and accusations have never really gone away, and keep popping up.

But this one is a blast from the past. This week, Tea Party supported US Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell shocked the media and political establishment in a surprise primary victory. Even before, but certainly after, there has been much attention on the more extreme statements and background elements to this religion-invoking populist candidate.

This one caught my eye. Not unlike Ann Coulter, repeat guest appearances on Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect back in the 1990s played a part in raising O'Donnell's public profile. In one appearance, O'Donnell states that she "dabbled" in witchcraft and Satanism (a common conflation on the religious right in particular), and had a date on a "Satanic altar." She is admitting this to back up her stance that Halloween is Satanic, again, a far right Christian hobby horse. Can't guarantee how long the video will be around

Wanna Buy England's Most Haunted House?

2010-09-18T08:04:00.000-05:00

I have previously reviewed legal concerns and business practices regarding the sale of "haunted" property, and other sorts of ways in which paranormal beliefs and folklore intersect with the law.

While most of the concerns have been that a haunted reputation would damage property values, I've wondered if and when a haunting would be a plus. I need not wait anymore. In the current depressed real estate market, a house being "England's Most Haunted" is being used as a selling point. Digital Journal has the details on Wymering House, including television video of ghost hunting in the house, link to the Daily Mail story, and the actual listing itself.

It's an interesting paradox. On the one hand, stories attached to objects and structures should add extra cultural value. We've seen this with the fad a few years ago of selling "haunted" paintings and other objects on Ebay, where virtually the entire value was based on the purported history and supernatural aspects of the object. Museums are no strangers to notorious objects having an added cachet. As Phantom Limb from The Venture Brothers reminds us, the Mona Lisa is famous because it was stolen.

Never mind consumer capitalism. Historical and supernatural history is at the heart of prestige objects globally. Bronislaw Malinowski illustrated this in his classic groundbreaking ethnography Argonauts of the Western Pacific (read it at archive.org). He describes the kula exchange of the Trobriand Islanders of the early 20th century, in which inter-island trade is organized through the exchange of shell jewelry. But these aren't just random items, they have individual names and legends, that is part of what makes them valuable.

At the same time, in regards to haunted houses, the stories of ghostly doings may have little positive, and great negative effect on saleability. Non-believers in such phenomena might find the stories charming, but will likely not be that effected by them (enough to pay extra). Believers, on the other hand, may not want anything to do with a house full of tormented and tormenting spirits.

The Chinese UFO and Yeren Flaps - Not that Surprising

2010-07-25T23:24:00.003-05:00

Mainstream media, never mind fringe topics blogs and sites, have been awash with stories in the last week of UFO sightings over China. The closing of an airport due to concerns over the UFOs seems to be the focal point when these stories grabbed hold in the global media. The coverage has been skeptical from the beginning, focusing on current social context or materialist explanations (much speculation about Chinese military activity). I guess distance allows for some distillation away of both the ridicule factor and the mystery mongering for clicks factor.

Forgetmori has an expose on the various images coming out of this wave.

Less high profile have been some recent reports and activity about the Yeren, China's wild man.

Especially in regards to the UFO wave/panic, there seems to be some element of viewing Chinese interest in fringe topics to be evidence of recent Westernization and affluence. But this view misses a lot of history and context. The concept of "anomalies," ranging from miracles to odd occurrences and phenomena, in Chinese natural and historical writing is quite old. Robert Ford Campany's Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China discusses the role of anomalies in views of the government and its relationship to nature, and how they were utilized by various religions.

More recently, both the topics of the yeren and the UFO have had complicated and contradictory relationships with the populace, science, and the Chinese government. Sigrid Schmalzer discusses the popular image of the yeren in her book The People's Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in Twentieth-Century China, those who have sought it, its intertwining with "Peking Man" fossils of Homo erectus and China's identity as both a scientific society and one with concern for ancestors, and changing government attitudes in the 20th century towards science and the benefits and dangers of "peoples'" organizations in society. Much ink has been spilled on North American attitudes towards its Bigfoot wild man and how it relates to populism, masculinity, attitudes towards nature, and so on, but arguably the story of the yeren is more complex. And unlike the case of Bigfoot, yeren researchers have had changing relationships with the government, ranging from regulation and control to sponsorship, as government officials have alternately not wanted to promote yeren stories because they are "superstition," to supporting research into the yeren to debunk superstition.

Likewise, the history of UFOs in China has a similar tension of government tacit support or at least lack of disapproval of UFO research groups. UFO Evidence has a solid collection of news articles from the last decade on UFOs in China, many discussing the issue of Chinese social and political attitudes towards the topic. UFO groups and researchers are not as politically worrying as other grassroots organizations that concern the government (such as religious groups like Falun Gong), and are seen as falling into the realm of science and scientific interest. For an urbanizing society pursuing high technology based manufacturing and a growing space program, such an emphasis is not surprising. It bears noting that the golden age of UFOs (as interpreted through the nuts and bolts Extraterrestrial Hypothesis, and apart from earlier theosophical or hollow earth concepts) in American culture dates to the formative years of its own space race, reaching a height as the Apollo program ramped up to lunar missions, and with the end of Apollo branching substantially into more esoteric and less "technology in the sky"-based topics as abduction, crash-retrieval conspiracies, ultraterrestrials, and paranormal viewpoints. Not completely ostracized from the government through either disinterest or active hostility in the vein of the Robertson's panel's suggestions and some of Blue Book's shoddier explanations, the more outre topics are not as welcome in a government-responsive Chinese ufology.

"Occult Materials" Forbidden in Electronic Payment Terms of Service

2010-06-14T18:16:00.004-05:00

Esoterica Occult Goods, 541 Rue Dumaine, New Orleans.
Image by Infrogmation at wikicommons

Warren Ellis has discovered that in the terms of service for a new form of electronic payment mechanism, the sale or purchase of "occult materials" are forbidden.

Apparently this is not unusual. Payment services at Google and Amazon both forbid such items, though Amazon, in particular noting that such materials may not just be those outlawed by states or localities, but things that "would generally be offensive to others."

Perhaps these companies are just using a boilerplate form, and isn't aware of what they're doing re: freedom of religion. But as I discussed in "Fear of Occult Ritual Scenes, a Folk Forensic Archaeology," we sometimes forget how deep religious paranoia and fantastical fears go in our society.

FeeJee Mermaid: Teaser from the UCM Museum

2010-05-22T13:34:00.003-05:00

I'll try to have a couple of posts springing from this. Until then, enjoy this little video teaser

Explosion at the Mothman's Hunting Grounds

2010-05-20T14:16:00.004-05:00

Excerpt below. Loren Coleman is invoking his Mothman curse in relation to a recent SyFy movie on the legend.

POINT PLEASANT, W.Va. (WSAZ) -- A powerful explosion rocked the night sky over Mason County early Monday morning -- powerful because it was fueled by ammunition.

We’re talking about an underground bunker at what's commonly known as the old TNT site near Point Pleasant.
That area is famous for another reason -- it's where the legendary Mothman was supposedly spotted. But, while the circumstances surrounding this event are still puzzling, investigators are confident they'll solve this mystery sooner rather than later.

"It was so bright it turned night into day," Adam Frazier said. "I didn’t hear an explosion, but I saw the light."

He said he shot a light about a mile away from his home around 1 a.m. Monday.

"I shot it with my cell phone because I knew no one would believe me,” Frazier said.

An underground storage bunker was the source of the blast. Empty barrels and metal storage boxes were thrown everywhere, some landing as far as 100 feet away in a nearby swamp.

"The steel doors were thrown off, and the ceiling is made of 6-inch concrete that lifted up and then caved in," Gary Sharp with the Division of Natural Resources said. "The blast was pretty extensive."

Source: WSAZ.com

Creationism, Hidden Codes, Reptilian UFOs, and the Texas School Standards

2010-05-19T18:55:00.001-05:00

One of the major players in the recent and ongoing Texas educational standards saga is Don McLeroy, the outgoing Chair of the Texas State Board of Education. He endorses this book

Sowing Atheism: The National Academy of Sciences’ Sinister Scheme to Teach Our Children They’re Descended from Reptiles, by Robert Bowie Johnson, Jr.

You can download the book here

McElroy endorses the book here

In this book, Johnson lays out his belief that Greek myth and art are intertwined with the Book of Genesis, and in fact, require (as stated in this article), Genesis in order to understand them. And that all of this is encoded in the sculptures of the Parthenon and other Greek Art, to the point that Johnson specifically contrasts The DaVinci Code (fictional) and The Bible Code (bogus) with his The Parthenon Code.

I'm not the only one to notice the obsession with reptiles (an evolutionary biologist doesn't see what's so bad about reptiles, see also several of the comments at Dispatches from the Culture Wars). This mention of reptiles and serpents again and again got me wondering if there was any tie here to Reptilian UFO beliefs, such as David Icke's ideas about shapeshifting lizard people who secretly rule the Earth. While Mr. Johnson has done interviews on paranormal radio shows including Coast to Coast AM (August 11, 2004), I see nothing in Mr. Johnson's writings to suggest he is interested in or supports UFO Reptilian beliefs.

This has not stopped Reptilian believers from embracing these ideas, however.

This isn't surprising. As Michael Barkun in his excellent A Culture of Conspiracy, or Christopher Partridge in his article "Alien demonology: the Christian roots of the malevolent extraterrestrial in UFO religions and abduction spiritualities" (available here), point out, even though the Reptilian has its roots in the weird fiction of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, this figure has flowed through both more "occult" writings as well as some versions of Christian theology, with the obvious parallels to the Garden of Eden and the Serpent. Barkun calls this improvisational millennialism, a theme throughout his book that fringe ideas cross-pollinate and show up in the most unexpected places, including regular fact-fiction boundary transgressions, where ideas from fiction become evidence for conspiracy theories or even the theories themselves.

There is no direct tie between any of these beliefs. Alternative art history need not be tied in with religious or conspiracy or UFO beliefs (despite von Daniken). Creationism is a widely held belief, whereas belief in Reptilian aliens or demons is not. And as Barkun notes in his book, while David Icke does court some from the extreme right in his writings and presentations, his larger spiritual message would probably not be very well-received by many Creationist Christians. But by being outside the mainstream (either in general numbers or in terms of institutions), we can see how these ideas flow from one genre to the next, often in less than predictable ways.

Crystal Head Vodka Update: Quest for the Bottle Banned in Ontario!

2010-05-19T14:42:00.006-05:00

As you may remember, I was stunned by the ad campaign for this vodka, and blogged about it two years ago. ("Dan Ackroyd and the Kingdom of the Booze Bottles")

Since then, two updates, first the bad, then the good

The first is recent news. Ontario has banned Crystal Head Vodka. Why?

“The image of the human skull is the thing that’s really problematic for us,” said LCBO spokesman Chris Layton. “That’s an image that’s commonly associated with death. It’s especially problematic at a time when there are concerns around binge drinking by younger adults, which in some cases unfortunately has resulted in alcohol poisoning.”

So, I don't know if this is overzealous "what about the children" nanny state-ing, or if it is part of a Canadian version of Satanic Panic. But it is depressing.

So, lets talk the good. Last year, I was able to get my hands on a bottle. Since then, it's been relatively easy to find. But a year ago, when I was living in rural southern Illinois, I couldn't find it. I looked for months. Until I got a tip that some was in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. So off I went on a quest for the Crystal Skull ... liquor bottle.

I did obtain a copy, and it was pretty good stuff. I'm no expert, but to myself and those I shared it with at my going away party in Illinois last year, it was fairly smooth and tasty. So, for all those in Ontario, here's what you're missing.

UK Royal Navy: No Sea Serpent X-Files

2010-05-17T18:04:00.005-05:00

Amazing Stories Volume 1, No. 3, June 1926. Source: Wikicommons

An unnamed marine biologist has requested the United Kingdom's Royal Navy provide documentation on

"abnormally large or dangerous sea monsters hundreds of metres under the sea"

but apparently the MoD doesn't centralize such reports, and the Freedom of Information office isn't going to seek out all such reports, for logistical reasons. (UK Press Association).

The real question is, who made the request, and what are they looking for? It's the Bloop, isn't it?

The contrast with the case of Loch Ness is notable. We have records of government discussions over how to protect Nessie legally, and that in the early years of the Nessie craze, local police believed in the existence of the creature, and worked with the national government to protect it.

Online Cryptid Coloring Book

2010-03-09T20:33:00.001-06:00

However, you can't color outside the lines

http://www.thecolor.com/Category/Coloring/Cryptids.aspx

Neat video on the Acambaro Figurines

2010-03-02T22:03:00.002-06:00

From the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Enjoy.

The Paracast - Arguably the Most Interesting of the Paranormal Podcasts

2010-02-22T13:14:00.003-06:00

Years ago, I did a post noting the importance of radio/podcasts to the paranormal community. When I did it, I give mention, but not much more, of The Paracast. That was because I had just discovered it. Over time, I think the show, hosted by Gene Steinberg and David Biedny, got better and better, as it got more and more examining and critical of some of the less-reliable or believable guests they interviewed. More intriguingly, there started to be a move towards falsifying and discarding certain elements that float around these various communities. The episode examining and then putting away MJ-12, for example, is a highlight. A recent interview with David M. Rountree made me at least intrigued by ghost hunting, a topic that usually does little to interest me. Last year's "wake" round tables after the deaths of Richard Hall, John Keel, and Mac Tonnies were depressing as you might imagine, but very informative (especially the Keel one on Keel's earlier years pre-Mothman) and demonstrative of the ability of The Paracast to get good guests and spark them to make good discussion, rather than just the usual sell-spiel.

For several weeks now, I've been meaning to make a "Check out The Paracast Archives" post, and haven't gotten around to it (partly because I got hung up on trying to recommend a top ten list of episodes; I've ultimately decided that mileage varies, so people should instead check out some of the episode discussions on The Paracast forums to see what they may or may not like).

But today news has reached me that one of the two creators/co-hosts, David Biedny, has left the show. Fans of the show know that dealing with the idiocy that these topics often attract had been increasingly exasperating Mr. Biedny. Any other reasons are his own. This is not an appeal for his return, simply a thank you for the time and effort he spent actually listening to and responding intelligently to the people interviewed on the show, whether this ultimately was something the interviewees preferred or not.

Cryptozoology and Religion - Interesting article and a comment

2010-02-19T21:41:00.004-06:00

Interesting overview article on cryptozoology and religion, by Joe Laycock at Science and Religion Today, suggesting a parallel between fringe science efforts and religious fundamentalism. He argues that both attempt to re-sacralize a world stripped of mystery by science, specifically natural selection and evolution. Though perhaps sacralize isn't the proper term, more an issue of both approaching the sublime.

Laycock notes that Creationists have turned to cryptozoology to back up some of their beliefs. He does not discuss that some cryptozoological expeditions have a Creationist agenda to them, as attempts to find living Mesozoic reptiles such as dinosaurs or pteradons, in order to support Young Earth Creationism. But that's alright, it's not meant to be a tome.

But there is a bigger issue. Laycock doesn't really pinpoint why the two have started to cross paths. Yes, there is the sacralization thing, the sense of wonder. But that applies to many things, and it is why people who are interested in science issues can in many cases find common ground in activities rejected by mainstream science (like cryptozoology), as they focus on mystery and wonder. There is the Young Earth aspect or similar "prove the scriptures" elements (Bigfoot as Children of Cain in some ideologies, etc.).

But there's another aspect, and that's their nature vis-a-vis the mainstream: both are forbidden. In his book A Culture of Conspiracy, Michael Barkun uses the concept of stigmatized knowledge to explain how seemingly incompatible conspiracy memes transfer back and forth between religious, racist, political, and paranormal (specifically UFO) narratives and communities. One reason is that they are all labeled by the mainstream press, academia, science, and the political structure as being forbidden, rejected, or otherwise not just wrong, but excessively wrong. Once labeled as such, these concepts don't go away so much as start to transfer and hybridize within a pool of stigmatized knowledge.

Creationism is rejected by the scientific community, and forbidden by law (in the US where Creationism is most potent) in public schools. Cryptozoology isn't outlawed in public schools, but it simply wouldn't be taught, and it is rejected by the mainstream scientific community. Elements of both have particular beefs and interests in the fossil record and with evolution. Perhaps it isn't surprising that the two worlds have collided a bit, just as cryptozoology, once fully identified with secular materialist hunts for living species, has also developed an arm concerned with thought forms, UFOs, and psychic creatures.

The Space War Against the Moon Nazis

2010-02-15T18:48:00.003-06:00

The Space Review (a good solid science, politics, and history blog on space exploration) decided, possibly against its better judgment, to note that Richard Hoagland has graduated from the Face on Mars to the City on Mars to a Secret Alternative 3 style space war against the Nazi-driven Secret Space Program.

Hoagland's scenario is not quite as clear-cut as the SR post suggests (rather than being specifically Nazis, it suggests a secret elite using Nazi technology to colonize the Moon and dominate the Earth, not too far from the April Fool's Hoax gone wrong, Anglia Televison's Alternative 3 [video]), but it's not too far off. You can read the source material, but don't blame me if you got some Timecube flashbacks, that's all on you.

Monster Walks: The Mainstreaming of Cryptozoology Continues

2010-01-31T19:13:00.002-06:00

Of course, calling it mainstreaming is a bit disingenuous. Monsters, politely called "cryptids" by some, have had lots of popular interest for decades now. If Bigfoot isn't defending his beef jerky, he's fighting the Six Million Dollar Man (youtube link)(and by the way, six million dollars in 1974 would be $25,000,000 today. Steve Austin's cutting-edge cybernetics weren't much more expensive than an AH-64 Attack Helicopter, and I never saw an Apache fight an alien-controlled Sasquatch or go solve mysteries on the moon).

But when I read this article/friendly plug about a monster walk business set to open in London, it grabbed my attention. If ever any urban city in the world was going to be home to an entertainment experience focusing on monsters, London's going to be your best bet. From the Highgate Vampire, Springheeled Jack, and possibly even (though the article doesn't mention this) stretching the definition out to Jack the Ripper (more on that in a sec), London's got more than its fair share of historical monster tales for an urban environment. Then you get all the stories about monsters either set in London (the various werewolves of London, Gorgo, the dinosaur loose at the end of The Lost World, I imagine that's how they'll work in the Hound of the Baskervilles, etc. etc.).

And in a larger sense, London was the heart of the colonial empire that produced cryptozoology's most basic narrative: an intrepid explorer goes to "exotic" places to search for an animal never seen by civilized eyes (in colonial days this would have been explicitly White eyes), guided by native folklore that has mythologized the beast. While earlier studies of sea serpents can be considered the origins of cryptozoological ideas, the first great star truly owned by cryptozoology was the Abominable Snowman (or its various local names, mangled or otherwise), which was the stuff of British exploration and derring-do, propagated by the sensationalist media that still thrives in London.

And arguably, the very concept of the non-magical monster, a flesh-and-blood giant from the past, was born in London with the classification of dinosaurs, and their exhibition to the public at the Crystal Palace in 1854. At that moment, giants and dragons were declared real by science, and the only question was whether some of them still might be wandering about, in the exotic colonial lands (or Scotland) in the gaps where civilized history couldn't see them. Billions of dreams and fantasies by the young and young at heart were soon to follow.

Ghost walking tours have been around for years. In New Orleans, where I used to live, these spawned not just numerous ghost tours, but vampire tours inspired by the works of Anne Rice but soon including other monsters of the city's past, and in one case during the first year I lived there, a tour group witnessed a real-live murder. Folklorist Heather Joseph-Whitham has done some research on the New Orleans vamp tours. And in London, similar Jack the Ripper tours have been a staple for decades (while I've never been on one, my ex went on one as a teenager, and her description makes it sound very similar to many a ghost tour, and reminding me that a little drama and performance study in school never hurt anyone). UFOs had a higher-rent version of this, when one group would host paying would-be-contactees as they signaled UFOs with high-power lights as well as sound and thought. Bigfoot research has its pay-to-go expeditions too in the BFRO, though this year they are apparently limiting the expeditions to those who have previously joined in the hunt. So I guess with numerous television shows and other media dedicated to cryptozoology, a tourist walk would eventually emerge. We'll see if it has the same reproductive success other evening quests into the dark and mysterious.

Monster Talk

2010-01-23T11:51:00.004-06:00

My current work allows/demands me to listen to audio while I do other things. As a result, I've been consuming a lot of podcasts and audiobooks as of late, many associated with topics relevant to this blog. So expect more discussion of them here.

First up, a fun and informative new discovery I made last week, Monster Talk. It's the podcast affiliated with the site Monster Science. It's a skeptical podcast, now affiliated with Skeptic Magazine, about cryptozoology. I mention this to warn some of the people who have read this blog in the past. More importantly, I am someone who would be placed by most people into the skeptic box, but yet who usually doesn't like to read material specifically generated with that label in mind. And I can say that the sins (some folks in this little sub-subculture of paranormal culture can get overly pompous or derisive, and at times can be not much better than their targets when it comes to ignoring data) that drive people away from a lot of Skeptical writing are rare on Monster Talk.

I get the distinct feeling that this podcast was designed to counter History Channel's MonsterQuest. In addition to tv sound bites from earlier woo-docs of television past (I don't care what you say, but Leonard Nimoy's hosting/narration of In Search Of ... was awesome), the show is name dropped from time to time, and one of the hosts (Ben Radford) and several of the guests have participated in the show. Given the popularity of MonsterQuest, I'm not surprised, and I think this isn't a bad idea.

The real key to Monster Talk being good stuff is that more often than not, it gets good scientist or scholar guests, lets them talk with fairly good direction of the interview, and doesn't ask that the material be dumbed down. You learn about cryptozoological claims and their standing, but you learn more about the methods of biological science, fascinating ancient or modern creatures, the geology of fossils, the history of evolutionary thought, and other technical or weighty topics wrapped in a fun package. When the show delves into history or cultural examination of these topics, it isn't quite as good as it is with the physical sciences of biology or paleontology, but then my background is in anthropology, so that may be my bias/expectations showing.

I haven't listened to all the shows yet, but I would particularly recommend the following episodes

- July 2, 2009: Bigfoot DNA. Interview with Professor Todd Disotell of New York University, who has analyzed a number of alleged "mystery hairy hominid blood" and hair samples. This is exactly what most people who are interested in "monsters" in a scientific sense should be interested in, regardless of whether they like the results or not.

- August 31, 2009: The Plesiosaur Hypothesis. Discussion of all things plesiosaur, and the relationship between lake monster claims and the history of paleontology, with Dr. Adam Stuart Smith of the National Museum of Ireland. Unless you are a real aficionado of this branch of paleontology, I guarantee you will enjoy learning things about these creatures that you did not previously know.

- October 28, 2009: Darwin vs. the Wolfman. Dr. Brian Regal of Kean University discusses his observations on the effects of the theory of Evolution by Natural Selection on myth, folklore, and what would become cryptozoology. I don't entirely agree with his hypothesis, but I think much of it is correct and provides some important insights into the Victorian and 20th century ideas of monsters and science.

Go check out these and the other episodes.

What is ufology?

2010-01-10T22:51:00.003-06:00

Michael Swords poses that question (What is ufology) over on his blog. It's a thought-provoking essay, in which Swords suggests that the boundaries of "UFOs" have basically disappeared to include every sort of weird thing imaginable, from channelers to crop circles to cattle mutilations, and so on, and that this hampers the study of UFOs, since one can't even know what they are studying. He contrasts it with the original consensus, of studying structured craft in the sky, and suggests something open to new data, but closer to the old consensus than say a Keelian "anything goes."

I think that in addition to, as Swords notes, the cases where high strangeness and UFOs go together without any interpretation by a third party, there is a simpler element here. The vast majority of UFO studies, regardless of level of rigor or seriousness, are studying human-told accounts in order to understand not the accounts, but something the people telling the accounts may have witnessed. There are exceptions (physical trace studies, radar studies) that go along with the accounts, as well as some that may be contained without accounts (some photos or videos).

But in general we're talking about accounts. And this is to a large degree why other "weird" fields intersect with UFOs. Most other field sciences study either physical samples, or in some of the social and behavioral sciences, they may study testimony, but they study the individuals giving the testimony and their communities, and are not trying to get significant insight into something else they may have seen (usually). This leaves, a couple of fields as potential scientific or science-like inquiry models: history and folklore.

History does indeed want to get at past events utilizing human testimony (in contrast with archaeology, which studies material culture discarded by humans, a very different affair). However, in order to do so, a significant part of the work of history is analyzing those accounts in order to better understand them, and very possibly to reject them. Such methods become problematic in investigating something like UFOs where rejecting such accounts may either hurt the feelings of the living, of the family or friends of the recently deceased, or by proxy, insult those who have made similar accounts. This situation is only exacerbated by the fact that much of the money to support the activities of ufologists (or other weird-ologists) comes from the presentation fees, book and DVD purchases, and other revenue largely provided by people who have some stake in particular desired research results or directions. This phenomenon is not completely foreign to academic studies of the past (history is a powerful tool for influencing present events, and many a project has been designed with a specific political intent in mind, by the funders at least if not the researchers), but I'd guess that in most cases, the effect isn't as strong as in the weird fields (get labeled a skeptic or a debunker, and whole audiences no longer care what you have to say except in opposition).

Folklore of course studies the accounts themselves, their structure, their cultural and historical context, their importance, and in many cases is not concerned if they describe some reality (though in some cases that is also an issue). This has made folklore, as well as sociology, anthropology, and psychology, slightly safe harbors for studying UFO accounts, but by doing so, they are in the skeptic category.

Other suggested models have been something akin either to intelligence work or journalism, both of which take accounts from the living (who are expected to potentially be duplicitous), possibly quite fragmentary accounts, in order to understand and describe events and trends either large and abstract, or limited and specific. Unlike the sciences, however, these fields are generally fairly confident they can model what they are after: human networks of interaction and behavior. While there will be surprises of one sort or another, an intelligence analyst knows the general sort of thing they are looking for (a military operation, a spy network, a terror cell, an economic pattern), as does a journalist (a scandal, a cover-up, a network of criminals, a social trend, a crime). As Swords notes, this is not true of ufology, though it largely was at one time.

Ufology studies, in the main, human testimony (at times in conjunction with other kinds of evidence) in order to study what that testimony describes, and it generally does not do this from the perspective that all of the accounts can be explained by mundane observational error, cognitive or neural events, or cultural or psychological factors, as to do so would bring ejection from the field. What the "thing" described in these accounts should be, is Swords' question.

Debunking the Sea Monster of U-28

2009-12-13T21:04:00.003-06:00

Great article by Mike Dash conclusively demonstrating that the oft-repeated story, of a sea monster blown up during a battle between a German U-boat and a British freighter, was almost certainly invented in response to the original media frenzy over the Loch Ness Monster.

United Kingdom's Ministry of Defense Gets Out of UFO Game

2009-12-05T13:19:00.002-06:00

Sixteen days shy of the fortieth anniversary of the end of America's Blue Book project, the UK has ended it's MoD investigations of UFOs.

Fat-sucking vampire gang in Peru

2009-11-20T11:48:00.006-06:00

You may have seen the AP story about a gang in Peru supposedly murdering people to sell their fat on the black market for cosmetics use.

I might be less skeptical if this wasn't directly in line with centuries of folklore in the region, of the fat-sucking pishtaco. Which of course the AP report does not mention.

Google turns up this volume which I have not read, on the subject

Cholas and pishtacos: Stories of race and sex in the Andes

Edit: This Peruvian story notes the mythological connection up-front, and also quotes a doctor who is highly skeptical, as fat is extracted all the time by plastic surgeons but it has no significant value, and the methods reported probably wouldn't work anyway.

Edit2: Unsurprisingly, this turned out to be untrue. The surprising bit is that it may be covering up something bigger. This is reminiscent of various governments using UFO reports to cover up more clandestine activities.

Edit3: Slate has a researched, long, somewhat meandering and in a mainstream media way, mystery mongering take on all of this, placing it in the larger context of the legends of organ-legging and in the reality of transplant tourism.

Cat Registered as Hypnotherapist

2009-11-15T10:46:00.003-06:00

I wonder what recovered memories a cat could find?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8303126.stm

"The regulation of hypnotherapists in the UK is so lax that even a cat can become accredited, the BBC has found.
Chris Jackson, presenter of Inside Out in the North East and Cumbria, registered pet George with three industry bodies.
Each one accepted a certificate from the non-existent Society of Certified Advanced Mind Therapists as proof of George's credentials.
It follows a similar investigation by an American clinical psychologist."

Excellent Overview Graphic of 2012 Issues and Distortions

2009-11-13T23:06:00.003-06:00

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/2012-the-end-of-the-world/

It could be a touch more thorough, but overall is quite good and on the ball.

Balloon Boy: The 21st Century War of the Worlds

2009-10-16T07:18:00.004-05:00

See Update for additional UFO link

I won't go into the details about the Balloon Boy fiasco, but there are a couple of point worth noting, some of interesting comparison with the infamous H. G. Wells/Orson Welles War of the Worlds radio play 71 years ago this month.

- Like the radio play, this incident (I can't call it a purposeful hoax at this time, but mistake doesn't quite cover the mess) took advantage of recent developments in media and communication. The 1938 radio play was done in the manner of live international news broadcasts, which had just come into being shortly before the play aired, and had taken up a lot of the 1938 radiosphere due to concerns about a second European war breaking out (an element alluded to in the play). We know that this was on the minds of many, because many of those who believed the radio play was real did not believe it was an attack from Mars, but instead misidentification of a German air raid. A psychological/sociological study was immediately put into action, resulting in the 1940 book The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic

With Balloon Boy, a number of commentators have noted that this story spread via twitter and other new media, with bursts of micro-information keeping people glued to their cable news networks. This story, however, was entirely a creature of those networks, and reflects how they do business. People are making the inevitable "baby down a well" comparisons, and they do apply. But the breathless chase, the child in danger, the constant "breaking news" marks this as being very similar to the "child/white girl in peril" stories that have come to dominate the news landscape, the cable nets in particular. An outlandish story in 1938 could be believed if it conformed to the format of breaking war news. In 2009, such a story is believable if it conforms to a drawn-out and information poor individual peril story.

The great difference between the 1938 War of the Worlds and the 2009 Balloon Boy is that while the former was scripted by a media outlet and fooled the people, the latter was (as currently described) an accident happening to someone quite familiar with new media (entertainer on a reality show and Youtube vlogger who apparently had his kids on the roof when the balloon apparently escaped), then spun into a narrative by the media, which then fooled itself. This brings up the second point.

- The news media is absurdly bad at basic reasoning. Last year, CNN and other news outlets made a frenzy about the unveiling of a supposed Bigfoot corpse. Even the most basic investigation made it clear that the Bigfoot hoax was, well, a hoax. The "finders" acted like braying jackasses for months on Youtube. The man responsible for bringing the "body" to the media had been involved in a Bigfoot hoax before (he says he was fooled, but even if that is the case, that doesn't make the media reaction any better). And just looking at the images made it pretty clear, in the shady context of it all, that this was bunk.

At the time, I thought CNN and co. were just going along because it would get them some ratings as an amusing piece. Maybe they did, but after yesterday, I'm not so sure. The media did a horrible job with this story yesterday in either not thinking things through for even a second, or not thinking to ask basic questions. As soon as one knew the size of the balloon, either by numbers or by seeing it in video, it becomes apparent that it is quite small. But they kept peddling it. There was the question of a basket, leading one to ask if this balloon was intended for human use. There was no way an adult could ever be lifted by such a thing, so was there ever a plan for a child to go in this, in case you somehow thought it might even lift a child?

Either members of the tv news media really are as stupid as I have always feared but assured myself they couldn't be, or they keep spinning this story in full panic mode when they knew better. Given the freakout by CNN on 9/11/09 earlier this year, transforming a radio-only exercise into a terror scare on the Potomac, and the performance of its anchors on Celebrity Jeopardy this fall (Wolf Blitzer's infamously bad loss, and last night's third place showing, though at least not requiring a rule-bending bailout from negative territory ala Blitzer, by Soledad O'Brien), I'm leaning towards the stupid.

- This whole thing was quite interesting to watch from a paranormal/Fortean reports perspective. Never mind that the balloon was a flying saucer, or the oft-noted belief of Richard Heene regarding evidence of intelligent life on Mars. Throughout the coverage, we had eyewitnesses talking about having seen a basket or similar object fall from the balloon, and of course the claim referenced though not confirmed that the other Heene children saw Falcon enter a basket attached to the balloon. I don't know what the eyewitnesses saw, but it was quickly inserted into a false narrative. But my favorite has to be the photograph supposedly showing the fall of this basket. A neighbor snapped a photo, and only upon examining it, sees what they believe to be an object, perhaps a basket, falling from the balloon. Of course, once one sees the photo, it resembles nothing more than a standard "blurry photograph" of UFO/Bigfoot/Loch Ness fame, with no idea if the "object" "under" the balloon has anything to do with it, is a bird, or something else.

Ugh. You know, at least an invasion from Mars is awesome. This is just pathetic.

Update 1 PM 10/16/09: In his 9/11 call, Richard Heene says his balloon is actually more complex, and there is a directional or propulsion system that has 1,000,000 volts coursing over the skin of the balloon. As others have noted and I suspected, this is tied into the fringe-appeal science/engineering/community of electrogravitics. the most high-profile expression of this has been the lifter community (wiki here). Elements of this community are tied into fringe science, ufology, zero point energy, conspiracy theories (Nick Cook's The Hunt for Zero Point: Inside the Classified World of Antigravity Technology is a major expression of this), and the like. Given Heene's interests, this makes a lot of sense. No idea if he actually was electrifying the balloon or not, but that seems to be what he is talking about.

Here's the sort of thing I'm talking about. Tying Adamski into all of this is just icing on the cake.

http://linux-host.org/energy/bahnsonufo.htm

Magical Architecture Caches: Witch Bottles, Mummy Cats, and Abandoned Shoes

2009-09-20T23:53:00.007-05:00

Cross-post, due to update this year, from my archaeology blog

The discovery of a mummified cat in an early 19th-century Edinburgh building (dead link) reminded me of one of the niftiest things in historical archaeology, magical deposits. Common caches hidden under floorboards or within walls include shoes, cats, or "witch bottles" specially prepared with pins and urine. These were magical charms in British culture, and still hold some power. As noted on Brian Hoggard's page on these charms and other folk magic, cats were often destroyed or otherwise noted by construction teams that discovered them. They can be creepy whether interpreted by the discoverer as an unfortunate accident or as an occult artifact, and in some cases are burned to cleanse the deposit and perhaps help the cat in the afterlife.

Update: First witch bottle still sealed (and presumably containing urine) found in Greenwich.

Update: Article from March 2008 has nice images and discussion (dead link)

Update April 2009: Sealed shoes from Nova Scotia

Update June 2009: The sealed witch bottle has been analyzed

Real Time UFO Map

2009-02-24T00:30:00.001-06:00

Courtesy of MUFON, the UFO Stalker updates with events, with descriptions and links to full reports.

http://www.ufostalker.com/?mufon=true

Cthulhu Expeditionary Equipment Kit and Other NeoVictorian Curiosities

2009-02-06T00:23:00.007-06:00

Artist Alex CF produces intricately detailed impossibilities, including specimens from dragons, gray aliens recovered from Roswell, and scientific equipment for all sorts of Lovecraftian exploits.

http://alexcf.com/blog/?page_id=6

These should look familiar. Because they have as an inspiration the vampire hunting kits that were produced starting in the nineteenth century after vampires, and particularly Dracula, became widely popularized. Now of course, many have come to believe such kits were made in seriousness, and not as a luxurious equivalent of geeky replicas and toys today, and some have sold for exorbitant sums in auctions.

I am fascinated by the transition from "real" folklore to fictional folklore going on here. Does the transition help to mark all of it as fiction, or will it increase the credibility of things that started as stated fiction, but have been embraced by later generations?

EDIT (7/31/10): It's amazing how many vampire kits there are out there, and how much people have paid for some of them. Ripley's Entertainment, the company which owns the Ripley's Believe it or not attractions in various tourist spots, brags in this post that they have the world's largest collection.

Alien Fresh Jerky

2009-01-12T13:07:00.003-06:00

Someone is ready to ride the 90's nostalgia wave we should be seeing in about 3-7 years, depending on how the whole 2012 thing works out.

Alien Fresh Jerky. Great pictures from a visit to their headquarters in the California desert.

http://www.notcot.com/archives/2009/01/alien_fresh_jer.php#more

Tentacle UFO - Air Kraken or Lovecraftian Horror?

2009-01-07T22:04:00.004-06:00

It really doesn't get better than this: The destruction of a massive windmill that some of the locals blame on ... a phosphorescent cyclopean tentacled anomaly emerging from the sky

'massive ball of light' with 'tentacles going right down to the ground' over Conisholme wind farm.

"It was huge" he said "At first I thought it must have been a hole where the moon was shining through but then I saw the tentacles – it looked just like an octopus.

When I blogged last year about Air Krakens and other flying monsters, I didn't think they'd show up this soon.

EDIT: Fireworks may have been involved. But I don't know of Yog-Sothoth is going to like such slurs on its character.

Chemtrails Just Got a Huge PR Boost - Metallica Video 'All Nightmare Long'

2008-12-09T22:41:00.005-06:00

As I've stated before, I may not think much of chemtrails, but I love this music video. Very nicely done, and it will certainly give the chemtrail meme a boost. I could be wrong, but I think this is the first serious mass media usage of the concept in purposeful fiction

Note: This video is not really safe for work due to somewhat disturbing and gory content. Plus, it's Metallica, so you'll wanna listen to it too.

Video at Metallica site

http://www.metallica.com/index.asp?item=601688

Dan Ackroyd and the Kingdom of the Booze Bottles

2008-10-12T01:48:00.004-05:00

This is one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time. Never mind the "In Search of ..." opening and the prompt segue to hawking vodka in skull shaped bottles, which is good enough.

Wait until you hear about the manufacturing process for the vodka. I don't want to spoil the surprise.

Courtesy Martini Boys, Cabinet of Wonders, and Professor Hex

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZs29am4msg

Update: Yup, it's quite real, with reviews of the liquor being mixed. No, that's not a joke.

The Bigfoot Body Brouhaha

2008-08-14T22:51:00.005-05:00

Several of you have asked me about this in the last few days since

1.) The press release came out

2.) Loren Coleman on his influential Cryptomundo site gave it his A-M-A-Z-I-N-G support, before also posting the conclusion reached in the link at the bottom of this post.

This story has been brewing for weeks, which if you've been following it at all, makes it clear why I didn't bother to blog about it. Nothing has changed about that. It's not even interesting from an anthropological/sociological perspective, except maybe from a media studies perspective, and there isn't much new there to boot. I don't want to go into this any further. The following link, which has been ferretted out by a number of people in the crypto community, pretty much tells you the politest version of what I think about this

http://www.thehorrordome.com/HDSHOPPINGPROPS/SasquatchLARGE.htm

EDIT: If you want a fairly calm discussion of this whole mess, including the history of the people involved etc., you can go to the BFRO discussion forum thread on the topic, which lays it all out and has been on top of the costume explanation.

http://s2.excoboard.com/exco/thread.php?forumid=124725&threadid=1900226

The Dowser and the Legendary Gypsies

2008-07-28T23:26:00.001-05:00

From my soon to be local paper, a story that suggests psychic or dowsing techniques can be used to do the work of bioarchaeology.

The Mayor of Sesser, Illinois has asked a local dowser to investigate folklore concerning a Gypsy mass grave. Not only does the dowser suggests she can use some mix of energy (related to her Christian beliefs concerning souls) and DNA to detect graves, but also to determine age and sex.

While excavations won't be based on the "findings" of the psychic investigation, a historical plaque may be placed there based on further historical research prompted by the dowsing.

In my reading on pseudo and alt-archaeology, a big deal has always been made of psychic archaeology. Something I had never really heard of in new reports or personal experience (in contrast with other pseudo topics like ancient astronauts or Phoenicians in Utah). But I guess now I have, and I am amazed at it, and the relatively straightforward media coverage of it.

Vampire Archaeology

2008-07-16T12:44:00.006-05:00

A recent news report from the Czech Republic immediately grabs the attention: archaeologists have uncovered the 4000-year old grave of a vampire in Bohemia. Or rather, the grave of someone who was treated as a vampire. According to the report, sometime in the Early Bronze Age, a man died, and was buried with heavy stones placed in the grave over his head and chest. This is interpreted as treatment to ensure the man didn't return from the grave to plague the living as a vampire.

I'm no expert, but there is a problem with this. The development of the legend of the vampire in the Balkans dates back about a thousand years, with some elements being older. The term upir first appears in a Russian text in 1047 CE. Bruce McClelland discusses the history and development of the Balkan vampire (specifically focusing on Bulgaria) in his dissertation (openly available online) Sacrifice, Scapegoat, Vampire: The Social and Religious Origins of the Bulgarian Folkloric Vampire and in his book Slayers and Their Vampires: A Cultural History of Killing the Dead. In those works, he ties the development of the vampire to a mix of pre-Christian ideas about death and the afterlife and religious strife between groups during the early centuries of Christianity in the region.

And the folkloric vampire of the 17th century or so has many differences from that of Bram Stoker's Dracula or subsequent tales. I'm pretty sure Anne Rice never had one of her pretty-boy protagonists roll around the landscape as a literal bag of blood, easily killed by a puncture wound from a hawthorne, for the first few years of their undead existence. The classic Balkan vampires were most commonly "dead sorcerers, witches, werewolves, excommunicates, and those who died unnatural deaths (such as suicides and drunkards)" Some were destined at birth to become vampires, including those with a caul on their head, with teeth showing at birth, or with contiguous eyebrows. Also, if a human or unclean animal steps over the body before burial after it is buried, the dead might rise as a vampire (Oinas 1982). This last is very common (Mclelland 2006: 53). Also, in general, bad people, unavenged people, etc. will return from the dead. The Romanian version (non-slavic) suggests that unmarried dead people, or those unforgiven by their parents, have a greater chance of rising as a strigoi (Perkowski 1982). In Serbia and in Greece, at least, this happens 40 days after death, when a "devilish spirit" enters the body to create a vukodlak (Serbia) or a vrykolakas (du Boulay 1982; Fine 1987). In some greek legends (of the vrykolakas) children born on Christmas will be vampires).

But even if there was something vaguely reminiscent of the vampire in Central European cultures 3000 years before the first appearance of the term, tying those pre-literate beliefs to skeletal and archaeological evidence becomes very difficult.

There is, however, more secure archaeology involving vampires. Archaeology and bioarchaeology on several cases in New England has noted the relationship between tuberculosis outbreaks and vampire panics in the nineteenth century. This report describes some of the details (Sledzik and Bellantoni 1994) and this press release discusses the filming of some work for a documentary.

And a major update. Anastasia Tsaliki, a PhD candidate at Durham University in the UK, is conducting dissertation research on "disposals of the dead" involving "necrophobia." That indeed fits the bill. She has already written a paper on "Vampires Beyond Legend: A Bioarchaeological Approach" which she has made available on her blog. She is indeed pointing at the use of rocks as a sign of necrophobia, and tying that into vampire folklore. As I mention above, I am skeptical of this. Broadening the interpretation to a general fear of the dead rising is of course more acceptable, and I could see myself doing something similar if I were working on remains with such treatment, but it remains speculation. I look forward to Ms. Tsaliki's dissertation.

EDIT: New update. Lots of new information on the Italian "Vampire" announced last year.

du Boulay, Juliette
1982 The Greek Vampire; A Study of Cyclic Symbolism in Marriage and Death. Man 17: 219 - 238.

Fine, John V. A., Jr.
1987 In Defense of Vampires. East European Quarterly 21: 15 - 23.

Mclelland, Bruce A.
2006 Slayers and Their Vampires: A Cultural History of Killing the Dead. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.

Oinas, Felix
1982 East European Vampires. Journal of Popular Culture 16: 108 - 114.

Perkowski, Jan Louis
1982 The Romanian Folkloric Vampire. East European Quarterly 16: 311 - 322.

Sledzik, Paul S. and Nicholas Bellantoni
1994 Bioarchaeological and Biocultural Evidence for the New England Vampire Folk Belief. The American Journal of Physical Anthropology 94.

Into the Lair of the Mothman - My Visit to Point Pleasant, WV

2008-06-18T21:39:00.014-05:00

I've previously written a review of both the book and film The Mothman Prophecies, so I won't rehash the background here.

On a trip to Illinois to set up my new home, I took a side trip to Point Pleasant, WV, made infamous by the Mothman legend. The town has adopted some aspect of paranormal tourism, though not as full-blown as Roswell. The following are some images from that trip.

The Curse of Cornstalk has long been suggested as having something to do with Mothman and the Silver Bridge collapse. The Mothman has also been linked to "Indian burial grounds," that time honored source of American paranormal mayhem. Specifically, the TNT area (see below) is supposed to be such a site, and is one of the reasons why ghost hunters now visit it.

Part of a town historical exhibit of the Indian wars in the area, focusing on Cornstalk (on the left)

The town's shiny Mothman statue was inspired less by the descriptions than by some Frazetta cover art for one edition of Keel's book

I bought a homemade and expensive Mothman statue here. However, in doing so, I got the inside scoop on where to find some open bunkers at the TNT area, and was shown some pictures of "orbs" taken there by the proprietor. Speaking of which, several people asked me if my visit was in response to a recent episode of Paranormal State, which visited Point Pleasant. I've never seen the show.

While photographing the Mothman statue, I noticed the local Odd Fellows lodge, and no. 33 to boot (a number of interest to those interested in Masonic symbolism). Odd Fellows have always interested me, as their lodges regularly turn up a literal skeleton in the closet (apparently used in rituals symbolizing mortality) when demolished or abandoned.

The front of the Mothman Museum. I actually greatly enjoyed the museum, and it beats some other paranormal museums I've visited. In particular, I liked that it had many original artifacts, including clippings, eyewitness manuscripts, and items related to John Keel. It has been open for about five years.

About a third of the museum holds props and costumes from the movie The Mothman Prophecies. I didn't care about that (though I did notice the Chapstick). I was more interested in the rest of the museum. Note the MIB (Man in Black), an integral part of Mothman lore after Keel's book.

Point Pleasant hosts a Mothman Festival in September.

Cryptozoology is big in Japan, a country that loves its monsters. Below are Japanese toys of the Mothman and the Flatwoods Monster, an apparition associated with a UFO flap in West Virginia in 1952.

Here we have the stuff that interested me most. Original documents associated with the Mothman legend, and John Keel. Below is an early draft of what became Keel's book.

This letter by Keel captures much of the feel of the book. The letter is specifically about the Men in Black. They too were running around Point Pleasant and harassing Keel and friends. It appears at least some of the harassment was actually Gray Barker, making strange phone calls, unbeknownst to Keel. Note the inscription at the bottom. Keel was talking to numerous UFO contactees, and began to believe some disaster would take place tied to the sightings and prophecies.

Original early eyewitness report (possibly the first) of Mothman.

Original newspaper clippings give some idea of the scope of the sightings, and their association with UFO sightings. While Mothman is the most remembered part, it was part of a Point Pleasant UFO flap, which was in turn part of a national UFO wave.

The Mothman legend has become inextricably linked with the collapse of the Silver Bridge. After 13 months of Mothman sightings, the Silver Bridge in town collapsed, a major national tragedy. The Mothman has become famous, being interpreted as something akin to a banshee.

New bridge

Many of the Mothman sightings took place in an army ordinance storage area, the "TNT Area." After getting my hand drawn map and directions, I headed out there. After having minimal luck finding a crash site outside of Roswell, I was determined to get into a good part of the TNT area.

A rise in trash was a clue to finding some of the open bunkers. Guess that archaeology PhD comes in handy. This, and a lead I got in town allowed me to find some of the bunkers. A shopkeeper in town, who sells mothman statues, regularly goes in there and photographs "orbs" (a crossover from ghost hunting, which makes sense as local lore holds that the TNT is an "Indian Burial Ground"). I didn't buy a print of the orb photos, but I did buy one of the statues. In return he hand drew me a map to get me to this specific part of the depot site.

Once I got on the path, I ran into three teenagers. They warned me not to venture in alone, as something might "get me." I thanked them for the advice, and pressed on.

The nearby pond looked like the perfect home for some sort of swamp monster. Photo and video

One of the bunkers. I took some video too. Narration could be better and more courageous-sounding

Did my hunt meet with success? Well ...

Indiana Jones and the Extraterrestrial UFO Hypothesis

2008-06-12T00:39:00.003-05:00

I just saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. While it makes a total mockery of Mesoamerican archaeology (my professional forte), it was an entertaining movie. I'd rate it higher than the second or third films, but not close to the original.

It is also an interesting movie from the perspective of UFOs. The following will spoil the movie in a large way, so I suggest you don't read if you don't want to be spoiled.

SPOILER WARNING

A fair amount of interest in alt/psuedo-archaeology and ufology was involved in the making of this movie. I'll note some of the highlights

1.) The title character (aka Henry Jones Jr., PhD) was involved with the Roswell UFO recovery. However, the film takes its cues not from the Roswell narratives, but from a mix of Area 51/Groom Lake stories about security, and some elements of UFO crash retrieval stories that started appearing in the 1950s. Jones says he was called out in the middle of the night by government agents, forced to board a bus with blacked-out windows along with other scientists with whom he was not allowed to talk. They were each shown some of the Roswell wreckage and remains, but not given any real idea of what they were looking at, and were then sworn to secrecy on pain of treason. The idea of specialists being brought in dates back to the early 1950s in crash stories, but the blacked-out bus is similar to a specific crash retrieval tale dating to 1973, and stories of some of the security at Groom Lake.

It should also be noted that an archaeologist or archaeological team has been part of some versions of the Roswell story for decades. In the Roswell narratives, the team stumbles across the wreckage, they are not brought in to consult.

2.) Groom Lake/Area 51 vaguely makes an appearance as "Hangar 51" in Nevada.

3.) The "aliens" (more on that in a minute) are classical Grays. At least the ones recovered from UFO crashes (more on that too). Later in the film, other "aliens" are met that look like Grays, but rather than being stereotypically short, tower over humans.

4.) By 1957, there have been at least two other UFO crashes from which the Soviet Union was able to retrieve bodies. The idea of multiple crashes dates back as far as 1950 and Frank Scully's Behind the Flying Saucers.

5.) Unlike most Roswell stories, the FBI is aware of the case and at least somewhat involved. By contrast, Hoover is on record complaining about lack of access to Roswell materials.

6.) Here's the biggie: The movie favors extradimensional or ultraterrestrial "aliens" to space-faring ETs. It is explicitly and repeatedly mentioned that the aliens are from another dimension, from the "space between spaces." They have a flying saucer, but it disappears through an extradimensional portal, and does not zoom into outer space.

This is a very interesting little fact. Spielberg, one of the most successful promoters of interest in UFOs through his movies, has given the most public support for extradimensional ideas over the ET hypothesis. This is not a surprise. In his movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. one of the main characters is a French ufologist based on Jacques Vallee. Vallee would go on to suspect human involvement in many UFO cases, but in the 1970s, was part of a small group that suggested extradimensional explanations for UFOs over space-faring ETs. Another proponent at that time was Dr. J. A. Hynek, the designer of the close encounter classification system. As a result of legal action, Hynek got a cameo in Close Encounters. Hynek was the scientific advisor to Project Blue Book and had a high profile regarding UFOs, but by the 1970s had left the mainstream views on the subject and became what some called a "demonologist."

I'm not saying this movie will sound the deathknell for the public's widely held equation of UFO = space-faring ET. But it will likely make the ultraterrestrial/extradimensional memes much more popular.

7.) Ancient astronaut ideas are the core of the film. Some reference von Daniken's main memes about the Nazca lines being involved with aliens, or ancient artwork showing spacesuits. The visitors teach the locals agriculture, irrigation, and other technologies. But other ideas are reminiscent of Zecharia Sitchin. In particular, the legend in the film is that the gods (aliens) ordered the people of South America to build a city of gold. This turns out to be a misunderstanding of pseudo-Maya translations of "treasure" but nonetheless the gold and ancient astronaut mix sounds familiar.

I'll be curious to see what effect this has on popular ideas about UFOs.

The Charles Fort Files

2008-06-04T01:09:00.002-05:00

http://www.dragonrest.net/fortfiles/forthome.html

A project to index the numerous anomaly reports of Charles Fort. His books are not organized easily as reference materials, but this site will attempt to mine the books for that purpose.

Visited Point Pleasant - Home of the Mothman

2008-06-03T16:50:00.001-05:00

On a trip to establish myself at my new job posting, I took a little time to visit Point Pleasant, the infamous town haunted by, amongst other things, the legend of the Mothman. I'll be putting up photo, and maybe video, at some point in the near future. It was quite fun.

MUFON Stephenville Findings

2008-05-19T20:45:00.002-05:00

MUFON has made its conclusions about the Stephenville sightings.

http://www.star-telegram.com/804/story/650853.html

Mutual UFO Network ( MUFON ) Journals Free Online

2008-04-01T10:52:00.001-05:00

The Mutual UFO Network has teamed with Black Vault to put their whole run of journals online as free pdfs.

I haven't had time to go through them, but this looks like it could be an extremely useful resource for those interested either in the UFO phenomena or in the people with that interest.

Here's the link

Private Investigator on the Chad Drone/CARET Case

2008-03-18T09:37:00.003-05:00

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-drone18mar18,1,7704475.story?page=1

I've blogged about this one before, a case that began on the Coast to Coast website, and its stock in ufology has declined since.

I don't really have much else to say, except that I am surprised I continue to be surprised.

Here's the PI's website on the investigation.

Air Krakens and other Flying Monsters

2008-03-13T09:15:00.009-05:00

Following the relatively recent post on the pilots of the 1897 Airship Wave, Cabinet of Wonders once again reflects on Air Kraken Day (declared March 17 by the steampunk nexus Brass Goggles) by noting the fact and fiction accounts of strange non-avian creatures in the sky.

In the most recent essay, Cabinet of Wonders discusses recent sightings of jellyfish-like UFOs, while in the previous essay last March, historical and fictional cases get their due, including Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Horror of the Heights."

Other stories of air monsters don't have the popular exposure of those most famous "air monsters" (extraterrestrials and their flying saucers), but they do persist under the radar (so to speak). Thunderbirds are probably the most famous, but pterodactyls also get some attention. I was more familiar with the various hoaxed/art photos of late 19th century slain pterodactyls, kickstarted by an 1890 account of a dragon killed in Arizona. Over a century later, airplane passengers claim to have photographed dragons over Tibet.

But only recently learned that there are ties between the hunt for pterodactyls and creationism. Though it shouldn't have surprised me since I've seen creationists invoke the Loch Ness Monster and other sea serpents, and the Creation Museum is chock full of dinosaurs.

And lets not forget that in the early days of flying saucers, sky animals were suggested as a possible explanation. As were intelligent bees from Mars.

How the Astrologer Conned MI5

2008-03-05T09:17:00.002-06:00

There are numerous articles today about how astrologer Louis de Wohl conned MI5 during WWII. The story isn't completely new, but the details are nice to know. Long story short, in return for a snappy uniform and a sense of importance, de Wohl convinced MI5 he understood Hitler's mind through his obsession with astrology.

Problem is, Hitler thought astrology was bunk. In fact, he thought a lot of occult things were bunk. But that hasn't stopped a pervasive meme from exploding in entertainment and popular lore that the Nazis and especially Hitler were "nuts on the subject" as the greatest offender, Raiders of the Lost Ark, put it. Yes, there were top Nazis that were obsessed with the occult, most importantly SS leader Himmler (who did involve the SS in archaeological looting, ancestor worship, and occult ideas).

But that's the thing. You get a group of people together, in government or out of it, and interest in these subjects will be held by some of them. The use of MI5 by de Wohl can perhaps be chalked up to low-cost hedging ones bets in wartime. But in addition to leaders or their families taking spiritual advice (Nancy Reagan's astrological advisor comes to mind) as I've talked about here before, other government projects and officials have spent time and/or money on telepathy, walking through walls, UFOs, and finding Noah's Ark. And that's the stuff they believed in, never mind using the subjects to cover up other activities.

The Real Men in the Great Airship Wave

2008-02-15T11:08:00.002-06:00

The Wunderkabinett and Michael Busby have done some research on the names of reported airship pilots during the 1897 Airship Wave (adopted by some as an early UFO wave). To my surprise, some of these men existed, in fact quite a few did. Doesn't mean they were actually involved in any aero-experiments, and some of the most famous airship cases (including Aurora) have been shown as hoaxes. This is all being dredged up in part due to the Stephensville UFO flap.

I'm starting to see the appeal airships have on the Steampunk community. Or perhaps I'm seeing the results of that interest. Anyway, nifty stuff.

Indiana Jones Trailer: Roswell and Mayas

2008-02-14T12:15:00.002-06:00

The trailer for the new Indiana Jones movie is out (you can watch it here).

As I expected, it has Area 51, Roswell, and Maya ruins (though I didn't expect actual Maya warriors).

I'll be curious to see if they hire any "experts" to flack for this.

Reporter that Kicked Off Stephenville UFO Flap - Unemployed

2008-02-09T17:18:00.002-06:00

I haven't seen confirmation from someone outside of UFO enthusiasts, but apparently Angelia Joiner, whose reporting was at the core of the Stephensville UFO flap, is now unemployed. According to what is apparently her accounting of events, her newspaper decided they didn't want any more UFO stories. She suggests this was influenced by community leaders that found the intense interest embarassing.

So, she quit, but was told to leave the paper faster than two weeks.

http://ireporter.wordpress.com/2008/02/09/texas-newspaper-writer-unemployed-after-publishing-military-harassment-story-of-ufo-witness/

http://www.ufodigest.com/news/0208/joiner.html

UPDATE February 13, 2008: It appeas that Angelia Joiner has decided to keep reporting on UFOs being seen in Texas, employed or not. If this website is actually hers.

Inside the Science Fiction Event Horizon: Implications for Other Cultural Ideas

2008-02-04T14:28:00.000-06:00

I really like this essay.

http://www.computercrowsnest.com/features/arc/2008/nz12191.php

It points out the spiral in science fiction, of how entertaining stories using dodgy science in the 1930s then created a genre with tropes that increasingly made no sense. But because they were initially allowed to stand as tropes, they became time-honored, to the point where much science fiction, once seen as real speculation on science and society, became ever more like magical fantasy.

I think it speaks volumes about how once tropes in a genre, or a subculture, become widespread and popular, they don't go away, regardless of outside stimuli.

My first original post in this blog (the first two were a welcome and reposting of a review I had previously written) was about this very issue. How transhumanists were picking fights with the UFO community, because the UFO ideas were badly out of date in regards to technology and biology (though as I note, I think the transhumanists are generally clueless when it comes to human behavior). Likewise, Cameron Mcormick suggests a similar problem with the cryptozoological focus on big "monsters," and the regular invocation of colonial "discoveries" in the early 20th century as models for the hunt in the early 21st century. Pamela McElwee voiced a similar concern over the label of "lost world" being applied to populated areas in Vietnam, in turn spurring interest in hunting mystery wild men. And I can tell you from personal experience that many ideas in alternative archaeology have roots in very old ideas long since discarded by those doing professional academic research.

I don't know when, but I want to develop this point more. But I think it is a crackerjack way of thinking about the development of ideas outside of the realm of falsifiability.

The Curse of the Joker

2008-01-24T21:16:00.001-06:00

A few days ago, I blogged about Wired's story on The Strange Case of the Dead AI Researchers. It's not so strange a case, but it can be spun that way.

This is how media-legends begin. Here's another: The Curse of the Joker.

The NY Daily News, a paragon of journalistic integrity, says about the recent death of actor Heath Ledger:

Heath Ledger thought landing the demanding role of the Joker was a dream come true - but now some think it was a nightmare that led to his tragic death.

Jack Nicholson, who played the Joker in 1989 - and who was furious he wasn't consulted about the creepy role - offered a cryptic comment when told Ledger was dead.

"Well," Nicholson told reporters in London early Wednesday, "I warned him."

Though the remark was ambiguous, there's no question the role in the movie earmarked as this summer's blockbuster took a frightening toll.

Ledger recently told reporters he "slept an average of two hours a night" while playing "a psychopathic, mass-murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy ...

"I couldn't stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going."

The article then goes on to talk about how creepy the character is, especially Ledger's expected portrayal of him.

What the article doesn't do is note a later development, that Nicholson was referring to was the use of a prescription sleep drug. Not about playing the Joker.

If you were wondering how things like Tutankhamun's "Curse" began, here's a good example.

No More "Area 51": The World's Least Secret Secret Base has Its Name Revealed

2008-01-24T10:08:00.000-06:00

Homey Airfield.

That's right. That's the English-language designation Groom Lake, AKA Area 51 gets. It appears to be a descendant of an earlier nickname for the place, Home Plate, during the OXCART days.

If you prefer, you can also call it XTA.

It amazes me that, because of one reporter in Las Vegas, a guy saying he worked on a flying saucer, and a few activists, "Area 51" has become a legend and a household word across the globe. After its appearance in movies, video games, books, and countless tv shows, you know you've looked at satellite imagery of it on Google Earth.

Meanwhile, the US regularly operates out of secret military bases around the world, moving vast quantities of people, military and contractor, and material. And if you mention this to 99% of people, they stare at you like you're speaking Tzotzil.

William Arkin talked about these bases, for example those in Jordan and Israel, in his impressive book Code Names. Here in his blog at the Washington Post, Arkin goes into some detail about the secret facilities that aren't household words, that aren't even close to bubbling up into mainstream public view. And that of course is the point. As Arkin puts it

"There are some logistic security arrangements that we have with Jordan that I don't want to go into," Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita told the AP. I know that Di Rita is just a water boy, but this type of lying about the real U.S. military presence and intelligence relations with foreign governments ultimately undermines the war on terrorism and the American's public's ability to add its wisdom and values to the conduct of that war.

I'm all for legitimate secrecy to protect America's intelligence operations, but official secrecy imposed to obscure what is otherwise observable by the local population and the bad guys only serves to deny the American public the ability to understand what is being done in its name and to have proper context for understanding the not so insane targeting of our terrorist enemy.

Alien Invasion Board Game - Shameless Sort-of-On-Topic Plug

2008-01-24T00:36:00.001-06:00

In lighter pop culture news, I recently discovered that some old college friends of mine are publishing a board game (they are apparently taking pre-orders now, according to the website) called E.T.I., which stands for Estimated Time to Invasion. It has many of the themes of the mainstream E.T. hypothesis and conspiracy theory schools of thought, and the rulebook (pdf download) is covered with images of classic flying saucers.

Set in the mid-1960s, the players take on the roles of captains of industry affiliated with a loose conspiracy dedicated to reverse-engineering alien technology in order to fight off an invasion fleet on the way to Earth. Each player heads up a research corporation and competes for choice reverse-engineering projects. While the general goal is to help the Earth survive, like good Skull and Bones types, each player is really out to save themselves and get earthly resources and influence for their efforts. Oh, and like very good Skull and Bones types, one of the players has sold out the Earth and is in league with the aliens. This treachery will be revealed at some point as the would-be Quislings help lead the invasion. The entry at Boardgamegeek has a description and images of the components.

The acronyms, intrigue, mid-60s setting, and gleaming dummy corporations of Science makes me think of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. with a dash of U.F.O., recognizable as a distant cousin of the research phase of the classic computer game X-COM.

Stephenville (or Texas) UFO Flap - Military Offers Explanation

2008-01-23T14:47:00.001-06:00

Could have seen it coming a mile away. The US military has decided to send scads of ufologists and observers into a fit by offering the exact same explanation given for the Phoenix Lights - Two weeks after the sightings, they now say that initial reports of no jets in the area were mistaken, and that a flight of fighters were on maneuvers after all.

Maybe that's the case. One pilot in the area suggested he saw flares that night.

But it isn't going to be an easy sell. A number of witnesses described a massive craft. Others described incredible speeds. And some noted that they saw jets, but that the UFO was a different animal. Doesn't mean misidentification didn't happen. But since this is a well known meme in the relationship between the US military and the UFO phenomenon (cultural or otherwise), it will be an uphill explanation.

Meanwhile, Axcessnews lists several more sightings in what can be called either the Stephenville UFO Flap or the 2008 Texas UFO Flap, and responds to the F-16 explanation with further perusal of the reports. It also links in a videotaped sighting from earlier in the month in San Diego, California. It doesn't link to a report, also on January 8, from northern California. And a woman reports something strange in Jacksonville, Florida.

Update (January 25, 2008): Looks like people aren't buying the F-16 explanation. A good roundup by a NYTimes blogger points to a Dallas Morning News story that notes the witness descriptions don't sound like F-16 activities.

Update (January 31, 2008): Pilots involved in the sightings say the military explanation doesn't make sense.

The Dueling UFO Hunter TV Shows and Why Ufology May Not Be Ready for Prime-Time

2008-01-23T10:00:00.000-06:00

Positioned almost perfectly to take advantage of the increased popular and media interest in UFOs, two different television series entitled UFO Hunters will be airing this year.

Clearly the model for each of these is the popular American Ghost Hunters franchise and similar shows from the United Kingdom such as Most Haunted.

The first will be on the History Channel. Each episode will follow four investigators (one a previously known figure in ufology, but not the others) from case to case. The official website has the reality-style video in the opening promo, but the videos on the site are in droning narrator style, and I suspect may not be part of the show (and if they are, they are pulling a serious bait-and-switch). Much more information about the investigators and cases can be found at Slice of SciFi.

The second is on the SciFi channel, a stylistic spin-off of Ghost Hunters. As with the other show, two lead investigators are the main "characters" with a rotating ensemble cast of investigators. The official site has video previews, and bios of the two lead investigators. It is noteworthy that both have ties to Bud Hopkins. And in a promo for the History Channel show, an implant case is featured prominently. This suggests abduction will be a significant part of the mix on both shows.

Personally, I think the SciFi show has a better chance at success. The format has been tested and works. Two main characters, with an emphasis on them being "everyday" people, rather than degreed experts. The Mission Impossible-style rotating cast of investigators that are called in for each case (and importantly, not all male). The use of acronyms (ala the now famous TAPS). By contrast, the History Channel show focuses on four men (no women) who are older, and in the promos at least one of them, the most well known ufologist in the group, is already talking about how they know many of the answers, etc. in a style more suited to the stock-footage/talking head style UFO tv shows that History Channel runs every week. Furthermore, the History Channel show is focusing on historical cases, from decades ago, starting with Maury Island, hitting Socorro, and others.

This is part of the problem both shows will face. First off, while UFOs are hot now, popular interest in ghosts and ghostly matters is much higher, and was before Ghost Hunters ever hit the air. Second, part of the reason people watch ghost hunting shows of any sort is because there is the supposed chance that the camera crew and investigators, skulking around in creepy dark abandoned buildings, could run directly into the ongoing phenomenon. That can be thrilling and engaging. By contrast, ufology is for the most part a forensic study (if proper research is even being done at all), looking for evidence (physical trace, photographs, testimony) to understand a past event, a sighting. Attempts to build up dramatic tension will be much harder.

If you are wondering about MUFON Reports, Here is a Recent One

2008-01-22T23:52:00.000-06:00

The coverage of the Stephenville UFO flap has focused more press attention on MUFON than the organization has probably had in years, if ever. Several reports quoted the head investigator in saying the analysis and report could take a year before it is completed.

That's about on-par with MUFON's report on the infamous Chad/CARET drones of last year ( whenI made a minor post about them). The report is available here for download as a Powerpoint file. It is worth taking a look at, though I am suspicious of how their conclusions dovetail with a case MUFON is quite invested in. In summary, MUFON reports that the videos are hoaxes, but that the hoaxers are not who you would expect. and that there is a plot afoot.

And here is their interim report on the initial town meeting in Dublin.

Stephenville UFO Update Status

2008-01-22T12:54:00.001-06:00

I am still placing new media stories in the earlier Stephenville posts, where appropriate, rather than making new update posts daily. These are marked with (Update) and typically the date of the edit, so you can find them easily. If new developments or a new approach to the story comes to my attention, I'll make a new post.

I will note two stories of interest.

The first is claims by Walter Andrus (former head of MUFON) of UFO sightings over San Antonio the same night as the Stephenville sightings.

The other is a few days old, but I missed it. It is an editorial by the editor of the Stephenville Empire-Tribune, the newspaper that started the whole flap. I believe that without the paper's reporting, no one outside of the area would have ever heard of this, and it would not be a flap, which is not so much a cluster of UFO sightings as a cluster of publicized reported UFO sightings.

The Strange Case of the Dead AI Researchers - The Dead Scientists meme

2008-01-20T19:05:00.000-06:00

Wired published a story on Friday entitled

Two AI Pioneers. Two Bizarre Suicides. What Really Happened?

that spins the tale of two similar suicides, only four weeks apart, by researchers in the world of artificial intelligence.

Perked your interest yet? I bet it has, it did mine at that point. But there is something else to be learned here.

It brings to mind several manifestations of a powerful meme in the Spooky Paradigm: the missing and dead scientists. I don't know how far back the meme goes, I know it is over fifty years old in the world of fiction. Maybe it goes back to the Manhattan Project. But in brief, it is a collection of disappearances and deaths amongst top-flight scientists, or scientists within a particular field, leaving a pattern that suggests a sinister motive.

The most infamous fictional example would be Alternative 3, a television program that has left a substantial mark on the conspiracy and UFO parts of the Spooky Paradigm. This British programme was supposed to air on April Fool's Day, but because of scheduling issues, it aired in June, leading to many angry viewers who believed the news-style show was real (like the infamous radio iterations of the War of the Worlds). In summary, the show starts by examining a real-world concern of the day, the "Brain Drain" of highly educated workers leaving Britain's flagging economy. But the "drain" turns out to be actual disappearances, leading to a conspiracy of global elites, imminent danger due to global warming and overpopulation, and scientists kidnapped and forced to work on the Moon.

Alternative 3 may have spanned the boundary between fiction and conspiracy theory (some people continued to believe the idea was at least partially true), but there are two major examples within "conspiracy theory" where real-world events are interpreted through the dead scientists meme.

In the late 1980s, people began to notice a series of unusual deaths of scientists and others in the UK who worked on technology projects associated with military contracting (all had worked at GEC-Marconi at some point), including space weaponry. These deaths were considered suicides, though in a number of cases the conditions of death were quite bizarre. This attracted both the mainstream press as well as other outlets, but resulted in nothing more than. While speculation included Cold War spy games, terrorism, and corruption, the narrative that has had the most enduring play was that the scientists knew too much about some project they had worked on, presumably involving SDI or some other aspect of space weaponry.

In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11/01 attacks and the anthrax murders that targeted the American press and the Democratic leadership in the U.S. Senate, a similar list of dead microbiologists began making the rounds. The original version of this narrative in late 2001 noted the death of five scientists, but eventually the list would not only grow but also become merged with the Marconi scientists to make a master list. This time, the story is more obvious: by simply combining the deaths with mention of the anthrax attacks, an article suggests the scientists were involved with or could potentially identify the still-unidentified perpetrators of the attacks. Not surprisingly these narratives are typically constructed by those who also suggest more than al-Qaeda involvement in the 9/11/01 air attacks. Dr. David Kelly takes his place on the list after his strange and high profile death, also ruled a suicide.

Death lists are not restricted to the scientific world. During the 1990s, GOP and others passed along and added to the Clinton Body Count, a list of the deaths of people involved or believed to be involved with the Clintons and their scandals (the Vince Foster incident serves as the main wellspring for this meme). Somehow conspiracy theory martyr Daniel Casolaro ended up on the list, don't ask me how. Even more esoteric, Loren Coleman has created the Mothman Death List, compiling the deaths of people associated with the Mothman incidents, including the film version of The Mothman Prophecies.

All of these lists argue through compilation, bargaining that (to borrow from H. P. Lovecraft) "the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality." Or to steal again from fiction, this time from Ian Fleming, "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action." The counterpoint would be that the deaths are coincidence in a world with a lot of scientists where bad things happen to people.

And more importantly, that the facts got mangled by accident or on purpose by those compiling the lists. The NYTimes Magazine piece, in between soft paragraphs on coincidence, notes.

The article went on to call Benito Que, the cancer lab technician, ''a cell biologist working on infectious diseases like H.I.V.,'' and said that he had been attacked by four men with a baseball bat but did not mention that he suffered from high blood pressure. It then described the disappearance of Wiley without mentioning his seizure disorder and the death of Pasechnik without saying that he had suffered a stroke. It gave the grisly details of Schwartz's murder, but said nothing of the arrests of his daughter's friends. Nguyen, in turn, was described as ''a skilled microbiologist,'' and it was noted that he shared a last name with Kathy Nguyen, the 61-year-old hospital worker who just happened to be the one New Yorker to die of anthrax.

This is where we return to our two dead AI scientists in the recent Wired piece. The title of the piece promises mystery, possibly something sinister. The two men are identified as pioneers in AI, and their suicides linked and called bizarre. The story can write itself from there, leaping past the mundane to exciting plots of a rogue AI, an uploaded machine ghost hellbent on revenge, you get the picture. William Gibson already got the picture when he wrote an X-Files episode with a similar storyline.

Of course as soon as we start reading the piece itself, it becomes clear that other forces are at work, and one of them is the bipolar disorder one of the two pioneers has suffered from for over fifteen years, while the other was in chonic pain from a back injury and depressed as a result. But the title of the piece isn't

Mental illness claims two AI pioneers

is it?

This is the key to understanding so much writing and reporting about Spooky Paradigm topics. The best cases and reports hold up with scrutiny, but in many others, either sloppiness or willing desire to sensationalize or even remotely connect certain facts requires discretely emphasizing certain aspects and ignoring others. Wired is obviously not doing this, but the bait switch between the title (a title that got this piece a place on high-profile paranormal news portals) and the content is a good illustration of the principle. Snappy wording brings the piece far more attention and revenue or sales.

On the other hand, the same approach can be followed by debunkers. The NYTimes Magazine article above on coincidence doesn't just investigate the case of the microbiologists, it also loops in more bizarre pattern recognition such as numerology. This is guilt by association. And I would be clear that I am not trying to do the same thing here by mixing fact and fiction. A pattern of bizarre deaths, if properly investigated, that show common links is something anyone would rightly find suspicious. But it can't be ignored that the meme has a long pedigree in fiction, as attested by the text of numerous discussions of these topics that reference fictional examples.

So why mention all of this? Because I suspect Wired's piece may well end up spawning a new list: The Strange Case of the Dead AI Researchers.

Did I just change my title to The Strange Case of the Dead AI Researchers? Hmm.

Stephenville UFO Flap, Pt. 7 - MUFON Arrives in Town

2008-01-19T20:18:00.000-06:00

Over the last day or so, the stories have been primarily about flying saucer pop culture hijinks. But this local news report discusses the arrival and initial perspectives of the MUFON investigation team.

Update January 20th:

A slew of reports about the MUFON meeting. Most give a brief description of the atmosphere, and then describe one or two eyewitness accounts. I will note below if any deviate from this standard.

Local CBS television report (with video)

An account from the Dallas News is fair and interested, though it notes the tin foil hats and has an interesting description of MUFON. A Colorado tv station has a profile on MUFON.

Fort Worth Star-Telegram coverage. The Star-Telegram also has a story on astronomers exploring the sun dog explanation.

Houston Chronicle coverage. And a followup on witnesses that expands to the general topic of UFO sightings.

Cleburne Times-Review travelogue

Update January 22: Intriguingly, 60% of the reports collected by MUFON were not associated with the recent sightings, but of decades-old sightings.

Update February 8: MUFON will hold a press conference in Dublin, Texas in March to present their findings.

Stephenville UFO Flap, pt. 6 - The first videos and photos

2008-01-17T20:41:00.000-06:00

As I previously mentioned, a video surfaced from near Shreveport that was initially linked to the Stephenville sightings, but didn't seem that impressive. In the last day, three sets of photos have appeared that are being tied to the case of the Stephensville UFO, this time from Texas (at least one case, the other doesn't have much contex).

1.) An incredibly difficult to see cellphone video of what looks to be a light in the sky. CNN has been playing it today, and it can be seen on their website. It, and the "videographer," are unimpressive and the clip is presented poorly.

2.) More images come from a suburb of Austin, 130 miles south of Stephensville. The reporting outlet specifically states that this is not the Stephensville UFO, but nonetheless it is being linked to it by many people. The UFO was only noticed by photographer Virgil Fowler after he took the pictures. In contrast, the Stephensville sightings are supposedly of something very big, very fast, and looking unmistakably odd.

3.) A photo and sighting description only 45 miles from Stephenville, on the night in question. Unfortunately, the photo doesn't look like much, and has been suggested to be a sundog.

Given the huge media attention, I suspect more photos will appear that may have nothing to do with the Stephensville case, or be glommed onto it by excited news or bloggers. This phenomenon, of noticing unexpected things once they are pointed out elsewhere, is discussed by mori in the essay Attack of the Invisible Gorillas.

Update: More photos, but this time from sightings Monday night (January 14, 2008) south of Fort Worth (Stephensville is to the northwest of Fort Worth). And another video, released on January 23.

Stephenville UFO Flap, pt. 5 - Other Sightings in the Region

2008-01-17T07:28:00.000-06:00

While the Stephenville sightings goes on hold until for a bit (the main media activity is now talking to almost everyone in town), other sightings from around the region become linked to the story. In northwestern Louisiana, Shreveport television station KSLA ran this report (video link) (text link) a woman who videotaped a UFO the night of the Stephenville sightings (presumably January 8) in Shongaloo, Louisiana (290 miles east of Stephenville). The videotape, of several white lights with a middle red light is shown to a local "aircraft enthusiast" who identifies the lights as a twin-engine plane. He doesn't answer the report that the object hovered for some time, but I also suspect he would say that is a trick of perspective.

Closer to the epicenter, there is the expected rise in sightings. MUFON has collected numerous reports from Texas, including one on January 8 in nearby Comanche, any of which can be read in their database available at the MUFON site. The question will be, whether this spreads further, as flaps in the past have become larger or more sustained waves.

Update (January 18): Linda Moulton Howe interviews a man from Dublin, Texas, near Stephenville, who says he saw a huge UFO twice during the week before the mass sighting, and once after. He told his story after the flap was in the press. You can read the interview (with photos) at Howe's site (though it will go behind a pay-registration wall after a while) or you can listen on Whitley Strieber's radio show Dreamland.

Update (January 21): Other UFO sightings in Texas being reported because of the Stephenville example.

Update (January 22): Walter Andrus says a UFO was seen over San Antonio on January 8, the night of the Stephensville sightings. Other sightings in Texas still come such as this one. Here's one from January 20.

Stephenville UFO, pt 4 - MUFON Prepares to Investigate as the Fever Turns into a Flap

2008-01-17T00:50:00.000-06:00

January 16, 2008 - ABCNews puts the number of people claiming to have seen the UFO at over 30. By now, major news organizations have correspondants on the scene. Read here for more details on that, and the $5000 reward one of the witnesses is offering for a photo.

The next expected development is MUFON sending an unusually large investigative team this weekend. MUFON Texas Senior Investigator Steve Hudgeons is interviewed by San Angelo Live!, which you can listen to here. Findings from that investigation may take time. Though we should expect media coverage of the MUFON investigators talking to people and addressing the community. Realizing that MUFON is about to become a much more household name, the organization has set up a MUFON YouTube account to post their own videos and news media videos associated with the Stephenville case.

I'm using the word flap again because according to that interview with Steve Hudgeons, MUFON is now getting numerous UFO reports in Texas, apparently 19 since the incident broke in the media.

Meanwhile, a pilot who was flying in the area has suggested the sightings may have been due to military flare activity. Within the UFO community, this has become almost as detested an explanation for UFO sightings as swamp gas, weather balloons, or Venus. This is due to the explanation being offered for the Phoenix Lights episode in March, 1997. There, thousands of people stopped to watch lights over the city of Phoenix, Arizona. The case, both as a sighting and as a historical case, is complex, but in summary, after much military hemming and hawing and ridicule by state officials, the military declared that flares, dropped from an exercise, were responsible for the sightings. It does seem likely that the largest group of sightings, which were videotaped, may have been due to flares, but some dispute that and others point out that sightings were made in the area earlier in the evening of a structured craft. This was in turn followed in 2007 by a retired military pilot claiming to have seen a large UFO over Arkansas, only to immediately turn around and call the incident flares. The fact that this story was primarily run in WorldNetDaily, an openly politically hard-right media outlet, followed by a very quick debunking by the pilot, did not help matters. So this explanation is not a popular meme in the community. Completely randomly, also in shades of the Phoenix case, the city secretary has taken to wearing an alien mask as a humor response to the events (link has picture). This recalls former Arizona Governor Fife Symington's dressing of an aide as an alien in order to defuse a press conference on the Phoenix Lights. Ten years later, after ridiculing the people who reported sightings, Symington claimed to have seen the Phoenix UFO himself. So the mask thing isn't going over well, either.

On top of that, a random report on SETI has merged with the intense interest in the Stephenville sighting. Oakland, California television station KTVU ran a piece on January 15 that mentioned SETI possibly receiving an alien signal.

Whoa.

As you might expect, in the midst of a huge public and media interest in a mass UFO sighting, the news that aliens may be contacting earth perked up more than a few ears. Numerous observers were baffled by the report, both by the tone of the report (relatively light given the earth-shaking news) and that no other media were mentioning this. My suspicion was that this was a matter of confusion, involving a signal SETI received last fall, and tonight my suspicion appears to have been borne out. Not that this will help matters, as despite the media (and I suppose public) linking of SETI and UFOs, the camps are for the most part somewhat hostile, a relationship going back decades and in part fueled by the cancellation of federal funding for SETI due to Senator William Proxmire's belief that it searched for "little green men with misshapen heads." As you can imagine, in the context of a big UFO sighting, this hiccup involving SETI will only further some notions that the story of a signal was accurate, but silenced.

This is all happening because many people are following this story intensely, and are waiting for new developments.

Stephenville UFO pt 3 - OK, now its getting weird

2008-01-15T22:05:00.000-06:00

January 15, 2008 - The story has taken a turn to the strange

As a UFO story, it continues to get picked up by more media, and it has become common conversation amongst people I know.

But today's newest elements come from Bud Kennedy at the Star-Telegram. In his piece today, he notes that on December 11, 2007, a Scottish evangelist recorded a prophecy on a Christian prophecy website, Elijahlist. This states, as follows,

Texas, USA--received on 11-11-07

I see Texas ablaze and a stunning star, like the star from the east rising over the land. I hear the Spirit of the Lord saying to: "Watch for cosmic signs and wonders in Texas." He said there will be a cosmological phenomenon that scientists cannot explain, and the media will carry as front-line news.

People will begin to ask about "the Light." They will remember the Child in the manger; the Lord is calling His Church to tell them about the Child in the manger and the Man of the Cross. For a period of four months--from Christmas to Easter--there will be a window of opportunity for salvations, signs, healings and wonders in Texas, and this season of extraordinary favor and grace will manifest and be confirmed in unusual cosmic occurrences.

Then Mr. Kennedy reminds us that Stephenville was involved in one of the Great Airship sightings of 1897. And according to Texas Monthly magazine, it wasn't just any airship sighting, but it was involved with the Aurora crash, a crashed UFO story that predates Roswell by 50 years. In the Stephenville sighting of that day,

The editor of the Stephenville newspaper claimed that the airship hovered so close to the town that he was able to yell out a request for an interview, which the extraterrestrial pilot denied.

History appears to repeat.

The airship mystery is adopted by many ufologists as being a precursor to what are now called UFO waves. And the Aurora crash (see here for Kevin Randle's conclusions that the story was a hoax) is probably the second most famous UFO crash story after Roswell.

Prophecies coming out of the blue. A history of infamous UFO sightings. This is all starting to get that feel, of a little high weirdness of the type John Keel made famous in his book The Mothman Prophecies. We'll see how it develops.

Stephenville Flap, part 2: The Other Lore and Explanations Kick In

2008-01-15T08:29:00.000-06:00

Remember that just yesterday I said: "The story has no discussion of aliens, outer space, or anything fringe or kooky."

January 14, 2008 - As the AP (picked up by CNN) makes this little town at least momentarily famous by fairly "just the facts" reporting, as MUFON prepares to send an investigative team, the local paper that initially broke this story profiles the the local UFO expert (free registration required) who has become part of the case. He says he also saw the UFO that night, but this isn't his first sighting, having shot a UFO video in the same general area in 1995. He discusses some initial investigation of astronomical characteristics that night, ruling out the moon. You can jump over to the profile to also read about his book on UFOs and the author's ESP abilities, and his sighting of photos and chemtrails on January 9 (the night following the sighting).

I'll say no more about that, other than to note that chemtrails are in strong competition with orbs and rods as some of my least favorite paranormal memes.

Update: Well, here's a no surpriser. The UFO "expert" going on about chemtrails, has a past of fraudulent claims about his background.

Update (January 25): Looks like Stephenville is sick of the guy too.

Update: A blogger local to Stephenville posts his explanation, that the sighting is of military aircraft and flares, which he cedits to the the local reserve base at Fort Worth. It should be noted, however that while he could not rule out aircraft from other units, the reserve officer previously mentioned says no aircraft from his unit were in the area on January 8.

Stephenville, Texas - A UFO Flap in the Making

2008-01-14T21:52:00.000-06:00

January 10, 2008 - The Stephenville Empire-Tribune reports that two days earlier, four local residents saw strange lights in the sky, a UFO they refer to as a ship. One is a pilot. They also report the "ship" was pursued by fighter jets.

January 11, 2008 - The same paper, from the same staff writer, reports that more people are reporting seeing the strange object or lights, including a constable and an ex-Air Force navigational specialist. A local naval reserve officer believes he can solve what is now a full-blown mystery.

January 13, 2008 - A new report states that MUFON investigators will be arriving to interview witnesses and talk about the sightings. The naval reserve officer believes the sighting was a misidentification of an aircraft under certain lighting conditions.

January 14, 2008 - A local UFO eyewitness, enthusiast, and lecturer does an interview on a paranormal radio show about his claim to have sighted the January 8 UFO. Meanwhile, CNN has picked up the story and is bringing it to millions of readers. The story has no discussion of aliens, outer space, or anything fringe or kooky.

I'm going to try and continue to see what develops here, and if or when other aspects of UFOdom become involved, or what the media does with this.

The UFO as Political Smear

2008-01-14T09:15:00.000-06:00

I've already blogged about US Presidents and presidential candidates with UFO interests or connections. One of these is Dennis Kucinich, whose UFO sighting came to a head after it was mentioned in memoirs by his friend Shirley McClaine. While the initial interest in the topic is understandable, the subsequent revisiting months later by the Wall Street Journal is puzzling.

Well, not really. First off, UFOs in politics has become an increasingly popular topic in the media and amongst internet readers. Second, the Wall Street Journal was already a bastion of right-wing media in the US before it was bought by Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox News. On the one hand, Murdoch knows how to make money, as Billy Cox suggests by noting that the article was straightforward and got a lot of attention, and he has made a lot of money off UFOs (with little-known media properties like The X-Files, Independence Day as well as hosting UFO shows like Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction and Sightings on the Fox Network).

But a credible subtext of the piece, given its timing days before the presidential primary season is: Democrats are crazy people. While it would not matter much regarding the low-polling Kucinich, the story (combined with Bill Richardson's, who recently ended his presidential campaign, promotion of Roswell and UFOs on and off the campaign trail) has the potential to create guilt by association. It's a political smear, specifically at Kucinich but in general at the more progressive end of the Democratic party Kucinich attempts to represent.

A similar piece crossed my desktop today, from antiwar.com, entitled "James Woolsey: Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind." The piece is a hit piece on one of the architects of the Iraq War and a member of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). The first half focuses on Woolsey's history of interest in UFOs, after having had a sighting himself in the 1960s, and associating this interest with his failures as head of the CIA. This is the background, in turn for demonstrating Woolsey's lying and conspiring to create a war in Iraq, a war in Iran, and his efforts to start what he calls "World War IV." Here, there is no subtext, the obvious point is that Woolsey is paranoid and obsessed with the unreal, be it in UFOs or in WMDs.

Last year also saw interest in another alleged use of UFOs as a political weapon, this time by George Bush I's CIA against newly elected President Carter. I am somewhat skeptical of that story, though there are some hints that it may have happened. Louis Farrakhan's contactee-esque story of being taken into a spaceship and being warned of the 1986 American attack on Libya is also mentioned prominently when attacking his claims or activities.

The association with the subject generally seems to go in one direction only. Just as with academics who study the topic, other than as folklore or popular culture, advocacy or even interest in the topic can damage (though likely not be the sole cause of dooming) a politician. By contrast, this interest will find someone ready to embrace a well known figure, even if they are already known as a fringe politician or figure, such as in the case of Canada's Paul Hellyer.

Spooky Laws

2008-01-09T08:21:00.001-06:00

Matt Soniak at mental_floss posts on five cryptids that have managed to get state or national legal protection, even though the scientific community does not find sufficient evidence for their existence. These laws protect Bigfoot, Nessie, the Mi-Go (ok, the Migoi of Bhutan, not H.P. Lovecraft's Fungi from the Former Planet Known as Pluto) from poachers or other harm.

While perhaps the highest profile, these are not the only laws or government decisions that touch on Spooky matters.

One of the more famous is the US Presidential Determination that rules the Groom Lake facility, aka Area 51, out of the bounds of US legal action and oversight. This order, which has since been annually reaffirmed by Pres. Clinton and Bush II, quashed a lawsuit brought against the US government by former employees, or their next of kin, regarding toxic contamination and sickness. While not specifically about UFOs, it does touch on one aspect of the subject. Edit: It also now appears that Groom Lake now has an airport designation, one more thing to bring it in line with the rest of the world.

Less famous but more important is JANAP-146. In 1954, the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the US issued a directive that required civilian airline pilots to report UFOs, in addition to missiles, submarines, foreign military aircraft, etc. to the US military. Once this occurred, because this was considered information important for national security, the pilots were not allowed to talk about the sightings in public. Pilots didn't like being interrogated for hours, and then being silenced, so it is no surprise if any stopped reporting UFO sightings.

One law often mentioned is a 1969 addition to the US Code of Federal Regulations, Title 14 Section 1211. As noted by Snopes, this law is often misrepresented as criminalizing making contact with extraterrestrials or their vehicles, when in reality the law is stated to apply to NASA vehicles and personnel, and does not criminalize contact but instead allows for quarantine (which frankly doesn't sound better). The law was repealed in 1991.

In the ghostly realms, there are various state laws concerning whether or not realtors or sellers must disclose whether or not a house is haunted. In 1991, the most famous of these decisions was handed down by the New York State Supreme Court, Appellate division in Stambovsky vs. Ackley. The case involved a house in New York's lower Hudson Valley which had been repeatedly described in the press (with the permission of the owners) as haunted. When the house was sold, the new owner found out the house had a reputation for poltergeist activity, and wanted out of the deal. In the final decision, the court found that the previous press made the house haunted in a legal sense of stigmatized property, regardless of whether a house can be considered haunted from a scientific perspective. Because a haunting cannot be easily determined by a buyer or their inspectors, it is the duty of the seller to disclose the haunting. Since that time, Massachusetts has passed a law that does not require sellers to disclose previous ghostly activity, unless the buyer asks.

Recently, there has been a lot of news about communities deciding whether to allow or to ban psychics, tarot readers, and other diviners. Salem, yes the famous one in Massachusetts, has had a very public fight about the topic, as chronicled (along with numerous other similar cases) in the Wild Hunt.

There are of course various proclamations by the US Congress or state legislatures, never mind laws elsewhere, that designate various days to celebrate religious holidays, and this has at times included the paranormal. I believe New Mexico did this for UFOs a few years ago to promote tourism, and Nevada of course renamed a section of highway near Groom Lake as the E.T. Highway. But these are ceremonial, not involving serious (or semi-serious) law.

That's all I can think of for the moment, but I'll post any other examples I run across.

Update: 4/15/08 - Italian homeowner is suing the former owners for not telling him the house is haunted. Not that it is supposedly haunted, but that it is actually haunted.

NICAP Online Reading Library - UFO Books

2008-01-08T09:44:00.000-06:00

The new incarnation of NICAP has opened up a free online reading library. They currently have eleven titles primarily from the heyday of ufology in the 1950s and 1960s. Worth checking out

http://www.nicap.org/onlinebooks.htm