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.
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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.
-------
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.
------
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 (by ed
mcsweeney at tf).
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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