As Scott Van Wynsberghe has ‘outed’ himself as a transvestite let me ‘come out’ of the intellectual closet and admit that, like Sylvia Meagher, I also have some UFO books on my shelves. Over the last 20 years or so I also have acquired some books on ‘earth mysteries’ (though I never found a ley line); on alternative medicine (though the only time I tried acupuncture to quit smoking I came out of the session dying for a smoke); on psychological therapies (I was once part-owner of an orgone box, but it didn’t seem to work); and on the vast landscape of ‘psi’ (though I have no paranormal abilities).
If I could afford to I would certainly subscribe to the crop circle magazines, the Fortean Times and a goodly selection of the U.S. and U.K. UFO journals. I am, by the standards of Van Wynsberghe, at least one toke over the line into the occult irrational. But so what? In all these little fields of minority interest, despite the predominance of intellectual incompetents, cranks, charlatans and the commercially motivated, there is something real going on.
The important term to me in Van Wynberghe’s ‘occult irrationalism’ is irrational. The conspiracy theories described by Van Wynsberghe are to be rejected because their proponents disregard, or are ignorant of, the standard rules of inference and evidence. But the category ‘occult’ implies rejection not because of distance from conventional intellectual procedures, but because of distance from some conventional picture of reality. Rejection on the latter ground alone is too often simply irrational, usually made for defensive reasons. (Just about the hardest thing most people can do is change their mind.)
The Kennedy assassination and the UFO story are both examples of no-go areas for most respectable intellectuals. (When Scott Newton sent me the review essay on the Garrison case published in this issue it struck me that he must be one of the first British historian to take the subject seriously enough to actually read some of the literature.) These subjects remain disreputable because the mainstream intellectual community is scared off by the pre-emptive use of a number of labels, including ‘conspiracy’, ‘the occult’, and ‘fringe’.
The other thing is, several of these ‘fringe’ fields overlap in the most curious way. Take Fred Lee Chrisman. I first came across the name when he was tentatively identified as the oldest of the ‘three tramps’ photographed under police escort just after the assassination in Dallas. But I remember reading a piece by John Keel somewhere (Fortean Times?) which reported that Chrisman made one of the early reports of a UFO sighting in the great post WW2 UFO flap in the United States. Scott Van Wynsberghe locates the Kennedy assassination author Paris Flammonde on the Long John Knebel Show, a radio chat-show in New York, apparently with a reputation of giving space to UFO reports. As far as I am aware Long John Knebel first surfaced in this country in the book The Control of Candy Jones by Donald Bain (in the UK, Futura, London, 1976). Candy Jones was the stage name of an American model of the 1940s, who married Knebel in 1972. The book is an account of how Knebel and Jones discovered, through hypnotic regression of Jones, that she had been used by the CIA as a programmed courier; had, in fact, been converted into a multiple personality of the kind described by Dr George Easterbrook in the last paragraphs of Martin Cannon’s essay on Mind Control in Lobster 23.
Or so it is claimed. The status of the Bain book is unclear to me. No documentary evidence is presented in the British paperback edition I have, though there are textual references left in it to photographs and documents reproduced in the hardback. I have seen nothing about the case since the book appeared, but as a considerable number of living people are mentioned in it, my guess is that the basic legal caution of publishers has ensured that it is mostly true or true-ish. In any case little of what is alleged in it seems as surprising as it did in 1976.
Just as the ‘mind control’ story is part of parapolitics because of the activities of the U.S. military and intelligence agencies in the field (and their Soviet equivalents, no doubt), so some of the UFO literature of recent years has begun to resemble the literature of parapolitics. Increasingly the story is of the activities of putative agents of state, the intelligence and security agencies, and alleged disinformation and smear campaigns. (On this see Jacques Vallee’s Revelations: Alien Contact and Human Deception, London, Souvenir Press, 1992.) A recent re-examination of the notorious Rosewell incident in which an alien craft is reported to have crashed in the desert in the USA, concluded with a chapter on how to use the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.
Armen Victorian, author of the essays in Lobster 23 on U.S. military LSD testing and Timothy Good, is also interested in the UFO story. Victorian has identified the personnel of a network of scientists, military and intelligence officers, who have been spreading disinformation among the UFO buffs. (This was reported in that frivolous manner newspapers reserve for ‘crank’ subjects by Erland Clouston in the Guardian of 26 September ’92, ‘Anti UFO talk that’s strictly for the Birds’. The story itself appeared in the July/August edition [Vol. 11 no 3] of UFO Magazine, published at 15 Picard Court, Leeds, LS15 9AY, U.K.)
Geller
One of the UFO disinformation network, apparently called the Aviary, uncovered by Victorian, is Dr Harold Puthoff who first came to my attention as one of the American scientists who worked with Uri Geller in the investigation of his extraordinary powers in the mid 1970s. Unless Uri Geller is a dreadful liar — and there is as yet no evidence of this — he has been of interest to, and has been working with, the CIA since the middle 1970s. Geller has amazing powers but also has the political intellect of a 10 year old. (Not an uncommon combination in this field for some reason.) How could he refuse a patriotic appeal from the CIA? Episodes from this interesting relationship are included in Geller’s section of The Geller Effect which he co-authored with Guy Lyon Playfair. (Jonathan Cape, London 1986; Grafton 1988, paperback) ‘Hey, Uri’, says the spook, ‘Let’s see if you can project an idea into President Jimmy Carter’s mind’. And worse.
Though there is no evidence of Geller being a fake, there has been an extraordinary amount of disinformation spread about him. Guy Lyon Playfair’s section of their book covers some of this disinformation, especially the campaign against him by the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), fronted by the illusionist and magician The Amazing Randi. Playfair suspects this committee of being run by the CIA but has neither the evidence nor the libel insurance to say so. Instead he uses the old ploy of denying that CSICOP are being manipulated by the CIA. (pp. 278/9 of the Grafton edition). I know of no evidence that the bizarre behaviour of Randi and the other committee members towards Geller is being dictated by the Agency; they may simply be the intellectual incompetents they appear.
Whatever the explanation, CSICOP has done an effective job persuading the media (who, in turn, persuade the public) that Geller is a fraud — a stage magician. That Randi and his collegues can replicate a few of Geller’s simpler feats should tell us nothing. But the journalists who report Randi’s claims have forgotten — if they ever knew — the range of telekinetic abilities Geller displayed; and when Randi and co. report being able to copy this or that, the hacks conclude, ‘Hey, Geller’s been debunked.’ (A similar effect has been achieved by the hoax crop circles. As far as the media is concerned it has now been ‘proved’ that they were all hoaxes.)
It would not be a surprise to discover that the anti-Geller campaign has been sponsored by the U.S. state — the CIA perhaps — because of U.S. military and intelligence interest in the field Geller was operating in. Geller must have seemed rather threatening to the military elites beginning to work in the psi field. For example, he could erase data from magnetic tape and scramble the contents of floppy discs. The old yippy fantasy of wandering around the CIA’s computer centre with a magnet down the bell-bottoms becomes redundant. Worse, he was not only routinely demonstrating astonishing powers, he was also triggering those powers in significant numbers of the populace at large. Imagine how the U.S. (or Soviet) military and intelligence people viewed the prospect of large numbers of ordinary citizens being able to erase data tapes and discs, ‘read’ minds and bend metal.
The psi gap?
Any doubts that the U.S military were taking the ‘psi’ field seriously ended with the December 1980 issue of the U.S. Army’s Military Review which had as its cover story a piece titled ‘The New Mental Battlefield’, complete with cover pictures of Kirlian ‘photographs’ of the ‘aura’ round living organisms. This article touted an alleged ‘psi gap’ between the Soviet Union and the United States — the traditional beginning of a pitch for more research money.
In 1970 there were those fuzzy pictures in Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain of a middle-aged Soviet housewife busting a gut to move a match by telekinesis. Twenty years later I sat in a pub in Hull and watched a bloke casually roll a cigarette to and fro across a table top using telekinesis. I asked him to do it using one of my cigarettes and I made him a really raggedy, lumpy, uneven roll-up. And he duly rolled that back and forward with his hands in plain sight — until it veered off course and ran into a damp patch on the table. Then it stopped. He couldn’t produce enough power to overcome the increased friction between a damp cigarette and a table top. I was excited: he wasn’t. No, he didn’t want attention; no, he couldn’t do anything else; no, he didn’t want to do it on tv or for the Physics Department of Hull University; no, he wouldn’t tell me his name, and off he went. I’d been too enthusiastic and scared him off.
So don’t tell me this is all baloney — the occult. I have seen elementary telekinesis in operation. The world didn’t split asunder; my conceptual universe didn’t fracture. I simply watched a cigarette running to and fro on a pub table without being touched by anything (and, it should be said, without interesting any of the people I was with). But if that is real, what else is?