The
End of the End of the Paranormal?
A Commentary by Joseph M. Felser
I was enjoying a late summer's walk in the quiet Maine woods, happily
imbibing the spicy aroma of decaying pine needles as they softly
crunched underfoot. Suddenly, out of nowhere, an odd and disturbing
thought dashed through my mind like a startled deer: "The President's
child is going to die tragically in an accident." It was as if I had
been standing on the beach at the seashore gazing upward as one of
those old biplanes was towing an advertising banner across the
cloudless blue sky, touting some inane slogan like, "Eat at Joe's
Seafood Loft." This strange presentiment of death floated through my
conscious awareness, but did not seem to originate with me.
In the next instant, however, I found myself conjuring up an image of
Bill and Hillary Clinton, grief-stricken and somber, clutching each
other tightly, and walking arm in arm across the White House lawn
toward a waiting helicopter. [Full Text]
Do-it-yourself
Deities and Mail-order Messiahs
by Hilary Evans
In H.G. Wells's story "Jimmy Goggles the God" a diver stomps onto the
shore of a Pacific island in his diving suit (nicknamed "Jimmy
Goggles"). The natives, seeing this unearthly being coming to them from
the sea, unhesitatingly assume he is a god, and proceed to worship him
accordingly.
In our time, otherworldly beings are allegedly visiting our planet in
considerable numbers. It tells us something about human nature that,
almost from the first moment the flying saucers were reported, there
were those who saw beyond the nuts and bolts of the surface phenomenon
to its profounder and more spiritual dimensions. What seemed to most
people simply a mirror of our own tentative ventures into space,
manifestations of alien technology, carried for these others
implications of a supernal reality.
Intelligent
Communications with Extraterrestrials
by Montague Keen
Ask anyone, particularly someone with scientific pretensions, about
extra-terrestrial intelligence (ETI), and you are 99% certain to be
treated to a speculative account of ufological contacts, the nuts and
bolts argument versus the anti-matter hypothesis, the abduction
experience versus the psychiatristís rationalization, the
probability that somewhere out there it's mathematically certain that
advanced life forms exist on one of the several trillion billion stars
with their umpteen planetary systems. You would be unlikely -- and
judging from the experience of the National Institute for Discovery
Science (NIDS), extremely unlikely -- to find anyone to point out that
if itís alien intelligence you're after, the evidence is already
abundant; and if it's an intelligent means of exchanging information
you are looking for, why, it's readily available, widely practiced and
well-known, certainly to the growing minority who have troubled to
interest themselves in the matter over the last century and a half.
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Special Section: Literary Studies
Did A
Near-Death Experience Make A New Age Prophet of H.G. Wells?
by John Chambers
Did H.G. Wells, the author of The Time Machine and the inventor
of modern science-fiction, have a near-death experience (NDE) that
altered his perception of reality and forever influenced the type of
fiction he would write?
There is no indication anywhere in his autobiographical writings, or in
the numerous books about him, that Wells had such an experience. But,
as a schoolmaster at The Holt Academy, in Wrexham, Wales, in 1886,
Wells did, when he was not quite 21, nearly die as the result of a
rugby accident. Eight years later, he abruptly began to write the
unique brand of "scientific romances" for which he is best-known,
beginning in 1894-95 with The Time Machine. A year later he
wrote a short story, "Under the Knife," which is clearly about a
near-death experience. Though not recognized as such by the critics,
Wellsís short work of scientific romance, "The Door in the
Wall," written in 1906, may also be read as an account of an NDE.
Remarkably, this latter story contains many details about NDEs which,
owing to modern-day leaps forward in medical resuscitation technology,
we have only become aware of over the past few decades.
H.P.
Lovercraft: An Abductee?
by T. Peter Parks
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) is widely recognized as one of
the great classic American masters of the macabre supernatural tale, in
the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce. His blending of an
extensive, intimate knowledge of the history, geography, landscape, and
folklore of his native New England with his own elaborate mythology of
extra-terrestrial and other-dimensional beings, prehistoric alien
civilizations, and quaint and curious invented volumes of forbidden
lore like the Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred gave Lovecraft's fiction a
verisimilitude rare in fantasy literature. His stories originally
appeared in the 1920s and 1930s in cheap "pulp" magazines with lurid
covers like Weird Tales and Amazing Stories, but since
his death in 1937 he has won a solid, respectable minor niche in
American literature. Lovecraft was a scholarly, lonely, semi-reclusive
youth who later blossomed into one of the twentieth century's great
letter-writers and a warm, encouraging friend of many neophyte authors.
The
Psychic Life of Malcolm X
by Robert J. Durant
The Saturday Evening Post summed up the
conclusion of white America, and a substantial portion of black
America, in this comment about the publication in 1964 of The
Autobiography of Malcolm X: "If Malcolm X were not a Negro, his
autobiography would be little more than a journal of abnormal
psychology, the story of a burglar, dope pusher, addict and jailbird --
with a family history of insanity -- who acquires messianic delusions
and sets forth to preach an upside down religion of 'brotherly
hatred.'"
Spike Lee's motion picture about Malcolm X triggered a revival of
superficial and mendacious media interest in the phenomenon of the man
who was everything the Post said, but much, much more.
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Phantoms of the Earth: A Geophysical
Explanation for Atmospheric Enigmas
by Richard E. Spalding
This essay presents a collection of revolutionary ideas pertaining to
electrical energy in the atmosphere. These ideas grew out of attempts
to reconcile what is obviously a major dichotomy -- the attitude of
science versus that of non-scientific observers regarding sightings of
unusual lights and forms in the atmosphere. Scientists, in the form of
vigorous debunking by some and marked disinterest by the rest, make it
clear that they put no stock in these unusual lights, that there is
nothing in these sightings worth investigating. Although
scienceís attitude, and the threat of ridicule it engenders, is
public knowledge, sightings continue to be reported.
Which of these opposing camps is right? After a conscious attempt to
examine the evidence both comprehensively and objectively, I think
there is no escaping the conclusion that science must be wrong. There
are simply too many events whose descriptions and apparent quality of
observations seem to rule out misidentification of something ordinary.
More than that, sightings are frequently associated with physical
happenings at ground level, which, with or without the sightings, are
themselves unexplainable. Taken together, the evidence points firmly to
the existence of processes unrecognized by science.
Red
Herrings and Alien Abductions
by Kevin D. Randle
In July, 1996, at the MUFON Symposium held in Greensboro, North
Carolina, Budd Hopkins was disturbed by my paper about pop cultural
influences on the imagery of alien abduction. He approached me and
said, "You're not an abduction researcher!" I reminded him that he used
information about an abduction I had investigated in his first book on
the topic. I have been investigating alien abductions since the
mid-1970s and apparently before Hopkins started.
Four years later, that same comment was made, even after having
published a number of articles on the topic, and having written two
books about abduction. The second of those books, The Abduction
Enigma, written with Russ Estes and William P. Cone, has created
something of a firestorm, with many attacking without attempting to
understand the reason the book exists.
BACKSCATTER
On
"Demon Moose" by Martin Kottmeyer, The Anomalist 6, Spring
1998.
A Reply by Loren Coleman
Over twenty years ago, an unusual series of sightings occurred in a
small town in New England. A recent contributor to The Anomalist,
however, has attempted to explain away this event as due to a mere
moose. In order to correct this faulty interpretation, I will overview
the complex nature of the sightings, discuss this new theory, and show
that it does not stand up to a realistic examination of its own basic
tenets.
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