Fantastic Stories of Imagination September 1966

Sol Cohen (editor) Fantastic Stories of Imagination September 1966 (1966)
Having done my homework on this occasion, I've discovered that Cohen's time as editor of Fantastic was characterised by most of the stories in each issue being reprints, these presumably being cheaper than new material. Five of the seven in this issue are reprints, from what I can tell, and it's not looking great.

I actually plucked this one from the shelf upon seeing Murray Leinster's name on the cover, and while The Psionic Mousetrap isn't necessarily anything amazing, it isn't entirely lacking redeeming qualities. Similarly reprinted is August Derleth's Carousel. Derleth's contribution to the field as editor and publisher shouldn't be underestimated, and when the stars are aligned in a certain configuration, he's even been known to spin a decent yarn, but Carousel is unfortunately not one of them. It's not terrible, but you can pretty much tell how it's going to end before you're half way through the first paragraph. Swinging back to 1932, David H. Keller's No More Tomorrows doesn't make a whole lot of sense but is at least short, so most of your time is spent waiting for him to explain the guy with a massive head and just one eye, which he doesn't; and You Can't See Me! by William F. Temple is harmless, fairly stupid but not without a certain screwy charm.

A regrettably sizeable chunk of this issue is occupied by Eando Binder's The Little People dating from 1940. Eando Binder was a literary gestalt of brothers Earl Andrew and Otto Binder. They had a big hit with Adam Link, a robot character starring in a series of short stories, but whatever magic they may have pseudonymously wrought in issues of Amazing and others is not immediately obvious from The Little People. The Little People is forty leaden pages of science discovering real fairies on the grounds of Charles Fort having proven their existence beyond any doubt whatsoever because of all those myths and legends 'n' stuff blah blah evolution blah blah blah Eohippus was a tiny horse meaning that blah blah blah. It might be less annoying were it not written like Enid Blyton for adults, or at least Enid Blyton for older girls and boys, but mostly boys - although I read one of her Wishing Chair books a couple of years back as an experiment and Enid can be impressively weird in places, whereas this is just squaresville from beginning to end. Recidivist fairies, for example, are punished by reduction to what the Binder lads term woman-status, meaning their duties are limited to cooking and cleaning for a year. Even the illustrator apparently couldn't be arsed to read the thing all the way through, cladding his fairies in tiny versions of human clothes, contradicting the revelation of their captor, the evil scientist Dr. Scott, denying them such traditional fairy clobber.

Never mind.

Of the new material, there's Rocket to Gehenna by Doris Piserchia which I didn't read because it's one of those stories told as an exchange of correspondence, and I can't be doing with that shit. The other one is Roger Zelazny's For a Breath I Tarry - although it actually turns out to have first appeared in New Worlds six months earlier. Anyway, it's more of what I suppose must be Zelazny's customary science-fiction as pseudo-Buddhist parable, as was Lord of Light, but being significantly shorter is more easily digested and is actually pretty great. In fact, it's probably the best thing I've read of his which wasn't an attempt to make sense of Philip K. Dick.

So it's not a great average for this issue, but I guess a few decent efforts mostly cancel out the duds, although I still say The Little People was a barrel scraped too close to the grain.

Flying Saucers Uncensored

Harold T. Wilkins Flying Saucers Uncensored (1955)
I found this in Half Price, incorrectly libraried away on the science-fiction shelf, or possibly correctly depending on how you tend to view this sort of thing. It seemed promising with a back cover listing chapters on The Coming of the Titans, Stories of Colossal Space Ships, and the Mystery of the Martian "Death Ceiling" - no idea why the aforementioned death ceiling should be in quotation marks, and I can't even remember what Harold had to say about it; and this sort of thing seems to be getting a bit thin on the ground these days, what with the presumably increased collectability of vintage saucer literature and today's potential readership apparently being more interested in fat orange men from New York than little green ones from Mars. The author's home address is even given in the back should you notice anything a bit weird which he might want to write about. I couldn't really not buy it.

Unfortunately, Wilkins was very much a student of the Charles Fort school of paranormal journalism, writing in a very similar style and looking you right in the eye without flinching as he states that most reputable scientists now agree that both Atlantis and Lemuria existed and had flying machines. This would be okay but for his book settling into a steady and distinctly Fortean rhythm of endless newspaper excerpts reporting strange and inexplicable occurrences, many of which aren't even particularly weird. Therefore, as soon as Wilkins settles on, for one example, the subject of mysterious explosions, it becomes difficult to work up much enthusiasm for the impending twenty pages of single paragraph newspaper articles quoted verbatim on the topic of inexplicable bangs, punctuated only by somewhat minimalist commentary just in case we've forgotten the involvement of an author.

Strangely enough, a few days following this fire, the water mains in this same San Mateo region broke, and for hours streets and highways were flooded. The explanation was—just 'faulty valves' . . . . But much stranger is this: Two boys were riding bicycles in Millbrae, near San Mateo. They were not riding together, nor did they know each other; yet they suffered similar injuries at about the same time, 4PM. Neither could remember how the accidents occurred, or what happened just before the accidents. Both suffered head injuries and one was injured in other parts of his body. One of the bicycles was smashed.

I expect it was aliens, although Wilkins doesn't actually say, preferring to taunt us with an enigmatic just ordinary accidents, reader? despite that none of the rest of us have any fucking clue because we weren't there and the account is patchy at best. Such flim-flam is, I suppose, at least marginally preferable to the chapter on mysteriously shattered windows to which our host's contribution is the occasional interjection of here we have some more accounts to confound the scientists, and where one such interjection actually uses the word followeth. Fort did the same thing with endless lists of claims, few of which appear significantly mysterious, all working up towards an overarching loopy theory about how we're all living inside a hollow sphere and stars are in fact upside down active volcanoes. Wilkins doesn't even bother to pull all of this random crap together by means of some hypothesis which would at least justify our suffering, instead being content to bury us beneath endless newspaper articles while pulling a spooky face. Brad Steiger has been known to peddle some preposterous shite in his similarly themed books, but at least he kept it entertaining. I have to admit I may have skimmed the second half of this one.

The Third Policeman

 

Flann O'Brien The Third Policeman (1940)

I've been aware of this one for a while but couldn't quite get past descriptions promising a comedy set in Ireland involving policemen. I've already read Puckoon and it wasn't that great.

Thankfully it turns out to be a comedy in the sense of Gulliver's Travels rather than Are You Being Served? and is both fairly dark and massively fucking strange. More than anything, I'd describe it as a surrealist novel given the peculiar, slightly disturbing atmosphere derived from our man inhabiting a world where the laws of physics work by the logic of dreams. Specifically, if you've ever had one of those dreams wherein you realise you know how to fly or to work some otherwise superhuman power, but you know it's a dream so you have to tell yourself to remember exactly what to do so that you'll be able to do it when you wake up - and of course you always forget - well, The Third Policeman feels very much like one of those; so I suppose we're talking the general vicinity of Beckett.

Additionally, The Third Policeman approximately constitutes Menippean satire, and although it thankfully never quite becomes fully aware of its being a novel - which has become something of an overused trope, I feel - most other signifiers of the form are here, notably the book within the book - in this case the works of de Selby, a pseudo-philosopher who believes that, amongst other things, night is caused by an accumulation of dark air rather than the occlusion of sunlight. Quite a page count is used up in discussion of de Selby's crackpot ideas, many of which seem to echo those of Charles Fort, funnily enough, to the point of later chapters being squeezed up to the top of the page by lengthy footnotes concerning the man's imaginary works. The point of this specific focus is oblique but works because it seems to describe the nightmarish world inhabited by our unnamed narrator. Among de Selby's ideas we find, for example, that a person who rides a bicycle every day will eventually become part bicycle due to an exchange of atomic material between rider and transport, and so the bicycle itself will become partially human; which is explained with a straight face and thus maintains the integrity of the novel as a whole, as distinct from turning it into some awful Douglas Adams gag-fest. So it's funny, but you don't have to laugh if it seems inappropriate, as it most probably will.

The scene was real and incontrovertible and at variance with the talk of the Sergeant, but I knew that the Sergeant was talking the truth and if it was a question of taking my choice, it was possible that I would have to forego the reality of all the simple things my eyes were looking at.

Roughly speaking, we seem once again to be mapping the space between objective and subjective reality, which is possibly why so many of de Selby's peculiar ruminations seem to hint at the weirder findings of quantum theory - unless it's just me - as well as the aforementioned Fort. I can perhaps see why O'Brien claimed to have lost the manuscript when it failed to find a publisher back in the forties being as it sags a little in the middle, apparently spending an eternity in the police station - although that may well have been the point - but its growing reputation seems otherwise deserved.

Mysteries of Time & Space

Brad Steiger Mysteries of Time & Space (1974)
Being massively into the flying saucer shit as a kid, this one seemed life changing at the time, and so I recalled it as having been a cut above the usual fare without actually recalling what distinguished it from the usual mumbling accounts of a light which definitely wasn't a helicopter seen briefly in a field. Having since developed critical faculties, or at least some critical faculties, one might predict this particular trip down memory lane leading to inevitable disappointment, perhaps even embarrassment, but no.

As usual, Steiger cheerfully throws everything into the mix with casual abandon, even the stuff you would think might drastically reduce the possibility his being taken seriously by anyone at all; and so, aside from the usual saucers, swamp monsters, ghosts, and men in black we have human footprints in Cambrian shale, ancient spark plugs, and the United States of Iynkicidu. The key to Steiger's success is that he gives everything equal whack, and avoids the usual bollocks asking whether we readers have an open mind or whether we've been brainwashed by the so-called scientistic rationale of those so-called authorities scared to face the truth of the so-called facts. If anything, he takes apparent delight in how preposterous some of this seems to be; and because everything here is offered as a claim which therefore remains entirely subject to debate, it doesn't actually insult anyone's intelligence, excepting possibly the sort of evangelical hyper-rationalists who probably deserve it.

Steiger not only writes in the spirit of Charles Fort, but with this one he does a significantly better job in so much as that it more or less duplicates the structure of Lo! in seeking a means by which all manner of seemingly unrelated screwy claims may be seen as part of the same phenomenon, but comes to a somewhat more satisfying conclusion. Well, maybe not more satisfying - depending on how much of this stuff you actually believe - so much as simply one requiring much less suspension of disbelief because, rather than anything in the realm of Fort's upside down space volcanoes, one significant aspect of Steiger's conclusion is that there may be a strongly subjective element to the saucers and swamp monsters, even something vaguely compatible with Jung's take on the same.

As ever with books of this type, some suspension of disbelief is required and one should avoid placing too much stock in the reportage of anything which is obviously bollocks, but if you read with the notion that some percentage of what is claimed here is either true, or seemed absolutely true to those involved, then there's a lot of cerebral pleasure to be had from Steiger's efforts towards figuring it out, even when skating dangerously close to self-help literature, as he does in the conclusion.

Flying Saucers are Hostile

Brad Steiger & Joan Whritenour Flying Saucers are Hostile (1966)
Steiger wrote about a million books, many of which have been described as sensationalist, and even most tin-foil hatted of History Channel junkies seem to regard him as unreliable. I'm sure his critics have a point - despite the raw irony of one group of saucer nutcases looking at another group of saucer nutcases askance whilst muttering about the dubious credibility of their evidence - but the fact is that Steiger wrote some massively weird and entertaining stuff, regardless of whether or not any of it's actually true.

Once was that the charity shops runneth over with cheap saucer paperbacks, and aside from a few of the same blurry photographs which turned up again and again - even those which had been long since proven fake when someone found the actual model and length of fishing line - most of them were as dull as fuck: page after page after page of a farmer who saw a light and how it definitely wasn't a weather balloon. Steiger on the other hand never seemed bothered by whether anyone actually believed him and happily shared even the most preposterous and hence entertaining reports in a spirit which was more Charles Fort than J. Allen Hynek - and to give credit where credit is due, Steiger's tentative theorising about what it could all mean is usually less ridiculous than that of Fort with his silly ideas about stars being volcanoes in the sky.

As might be gathered from the title, this one focusses on accounts of the saucer people acting like wankers, marking a shift from the previously held folk mythology of benign space brothers as reported by George Adamski and others. Whether or not one believes, the book remains a fascinating record of its time, a world in which mass communication was very much a new thing, back when there was still a lot of darkness around the edges where the inexplicable might still lurk; and it works because a mountain of horseshit with some element of truth will always feel a more intuitively plausible description of the preposterous than pure horseshit and nothing else. In other words, maybe some of it happened, or at the very least, for something which didn't happen there seem to be a hell of a lot of people who think it did, which is in itself interesting.

Steiger churned this stuff out at least as fast as people could buy it, and his back catalogue brims with titles such as Discover Your Own Past Lives, The Wisdom Teachings of Archangel Michael, and others I wouldn't even touch with yours; but regardless of the actual homeopathic truth quotient of whatever tale he's spinning, I can't help but be impressed by the cut of the cloth.

Amazing Stories (February 1946)

Raymond A. Palmer (editor) - Amazing Stories February 1946 (1946)
I found this in a comic book store. It was falling apart, missing the final three pages and back cover - although I don't get the impression they featured anything vital - and flakes of yellowing paper came away each time I read it; but it was three dollars and the cover promising material by both Richard Shaver and Robert Moore Williams made it an essential purchase.

Palmer is credited only as managing editor - Bernard George Davis being listed as the actual editor - but his influence seems overpowering, this influence being expressed as a carnival barker's huckster enthusiasm for scientifiction and the idea that if we are able to imagine it, then one day it will happen - a position I recall having been taken by Bez of Happy Mondays during some television interview wherein he described what he liked about Star Trek. Palmer's editorial accordingly suggests that the contents of the magazine should be read as prediction as much as fiction, giving as an example the notion that readers of Amazing would not have been too surprised by the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, having encountered such weaponry in the magazine many years earlier. Palmer, in true pseudoscientific spirit, actually seems to have regarded Einstein as merely a fellow visionary, and suggests that many of his theories were obviously wrong, as demonstrated by tales published in previous issues because if you can imagine faster than light travel, then one day it will happen.

The divide between imagination and reality was clearly an issue with Richard S. Shaver, arguably the star of the magazine at this point. Shaver's I Remember Lemuria had already been rapturously received and Palmer was quite happy to capitalise on its success. The protagonist of the story tells of his being kidnapped by a race of degenerate subterranean beings called the Dero, whereupon he learns how the Dero have influenced human history by use of special rays which cause people to act with evil intent. It's a paranoid fantasy which seems fairly typical of certain types of schizophrenia, and Shaver seems to have related what he believes to have been actual events as fiction, so as not to cause panic as the legend has it.

While Shaver's tales weren't the revelation claimed by Palmer and others in mythology-building articles featured elsewhere in this issue, and nor did they necessarily constitute classic material, neither were they quite the incomprehensible pulp turds recalled by more stringent critics. The worlds and beings described are patently those of a man with mental health issues, and the plot of Invasion of the Micro-Men in this issue is as prone to absent-minded swerves as any of Shaver's fiction, but there's nevertheless something fascinating and compelling here - plus I suppose it could be argued that he foresaw nanotechnology ahead of the curve. This issue transposes the author's usual concerns to outer space with the Dero replaced by their interplanetary equivalent, the Jotun, degenerate inhabitants of abandoned caverns on a myriad of worlds, but tolerated by the utopian Nortan race, who are elevated and therefore almost certainly white. As with the Dero, the Jotun aren't so much evil as simply irresponsible and prone to mischief. Naturally they have a tendency to kidnap Nortan women for their wives, transforming them - so it is primly hinted - into freaks, which I take to mean that they give them comically massive tits by means of special enlargement rays. Even as we read, we can sort of sense Shaver wrestling with thoughts he doubtless regarded as dirty and therefore part of whatever was wrong with his head, itself expressed as the dominant theme of malevolent, invisible influence - whether it's those special rays or tiny men in the bloodstream.

Robert Moore Williams' The Huntress of Akkan is, roughly speaking, Abraham Merritt's The Face in the Abyss but with its team of plucky, hard-boiled adventurers mysteriously transported to another world. It's pleasant enough, and although it hints at some of the strangeness of Williams' later efforts, it lacks their ponderous and peculiar allegorical quality.

The rest of the magazine is competent but about what you would expect of its kind - pulpy and sort of predictable but not actually offensive; and Final Victim by Ray Bradbury and Henry Hasse isn't anything special. The pseudo-factual articles are more speculative than scientific, pretty much Charles Fort with a few grudging nods towards Einstein and the like; and there's The Bearded White Prophet by L. Taylor Hansen which suggests that Quetzalcoatl was almost certainly Caucasian, which is pure bollocks. If anyone familiar with this idea should still, in 2019, be wondering why it's all bollocks, it's because 1) the native records from which this legend derives were all written half a century after the conquest and represent an after the fact attempt to rationalise it, and b) some indigenous Mexicans actually could grow beards.

So it's underwhelming, but fascinating as an historical document, dating from before science-fiction was really a thing in the same way as it is now, even before the advent of the science-fiction paperback. Amazing Stories inhabited a world in which its genre was H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, a few other bits and pieces here and there, and then these generally frowned upon magazines with their lurid covers and arguably more in common with the trashier end of Hollywood than all that fancy book learnin'. Yet, there's worth here, even imagination, and if it amounts to compost in literary terms, then we should keep in mind that things grow very well in compost.

Lo!

Charles Fort Lo! (1931)
I never really considered the possibility of this having been published as a paperback, and never expected to see a copy, or to ever be in the position of reading the thing. My knowledge of Fort is sketchy beyond that the term Fortean - referring to mysteries which seemingly defy science and rational understanding - derives from his name, because he seems to have been one of the first to attempt to quantify paranormal phenomena as a legitimate area of investigation. Despite having regularly read Fortean Times for at least a couple of years back there, I'd fostered an image of Fort as a late Victorian iconoclast taking a sort of proto-Dadaist delight in that which made no sense and which pissed off scientists. This, it turns out, is only part of the story.

For starters, I have my dates wrong, and Fort's Book of the Damned was published in 1919 so he's more recent than I had realised. Nevertheless, he writes like a late Victorian, and his understanding of the sciences seems mostly pre-Copernicus in so much as that he doesn't seem to be entirely convinced of the Earth moving around the sun. The case for the defence, at least on this score, holds that Fort was throwing stuff out there for the sake of argument without even necessarily believing it himself, just to keep us on our toes. This may well be true, but it doesn't really help anyone engaged in the act of trying to read the fucking thing.

Fort's testimony is both absorbing and infuriating, and probably absorbing because it's infuriating. He digresses, breaks off and switches track half way through a sentence as one might in spoken conversation, talks to himself, speaks in riddles, forms new words, and cloaks half of whatever he's trying to say in the most ludicrous - if admittedly vivid - allegories or similes, requiring a certain degree of translation on the part of the reader. His narrative voice has something of the carnival barker about it with touches of a Victorian William Shatner, and certain passages are accordingly both exhausting and impenetrable.

March 23, 24, 25—a watery sky sat on the Adirondack Mountains. It began to slide. It ripped its slants on a peak, and the tops of lamp posts disappeared in the streets of Troy and Albany. Literary event, at Paterson, N.J.—something that was called "a great cloudburst" grabbed a factory chimney, and on a ruled page of streets scrawled a messy message. With the guts of horses and other obscenities, it put in popularising touches. The list of dead, in Colombus, Ohio, would probably reach a thousand. Connecticut River rising rapidly. Delaware River, at Trenton, N.J., 14 feet above normal.

That which he writes about is intriguing - showers of fish or frogs, mysterious lights in the sky, strange noises in the night, missing persons, or persons such as Kasper Hauser who seemingly appear from nowhere; and Fort takes obvious and infectious delight in relating incidences of this sort of thing, noting common patterns, and refuting what explanations may have been given. He even attempts his own explanations, invoking supposedly spontaneous instances of teleportation as a sort of common cause, which works for the sake of argument but places the author on an increasingly shoddy footing as the book squirms towards its profoundly unsatisfying conclusion.

In his favour, Fort presents a sturdy argument against science as dogma, and takes communicable pleasure in doing so.

Our data have been bullied by two tyrannies. On one side, the spiritualists have arbitrarily taken over strange occurrences, as manifestations of "the departed". On the other side, conventional science has pronounced against everything that does not harmonise with its systematisation. The scientist goes investigating, about as, to match ribbons, a woman goes shopping. The spiritualist stuffs the maws of his emotions. One is too dainty, and the other is gross. Perhaps, between these two, we shall some day be considered models of well-bred behaviour.

This works fine until the reader notices what he's actually been saying with all those colourful metaphors. What, he asks, if the stars are not so far away as we have been told, but are actually more like heavenly volcanoes studding the inside of a vast sphere? It would explain a lot, he suggests, and certainly it would explain the phenomena he has described, but for the fact that it's obviously bollocks and here we've been sat all this time, labouring under the illusion of dealing with a man who knows what the fuck he's talking about, or even one who knows what is meant by the term evidence. Mysterious clouds of volcanic ash may prove such and such a point in the absence of actual terrestrial volcanic activity, but possibly not when your evidence of the absence of actual terrestrial volcanic activity is simply being unable to find any newspaper article referring to the same for that particular month. Likewise, the last few chapters of the book border on embarrassing, muttering and mumbling over how that Mr. Einstein probably made most of it up whilst affecting a display of laughter at the occasional errors of astronomers, yet apparently missing the point that if astronomers are even able to make errors calculating the movement of celestial objects, then maybe it's because those celestial objects are actually moving rather than being stationary upside down space volcanoes, you fucking tit.

It's entertaining up to a point, but I'm reminded that Lo! belongs to the era of the Nazis with their similarly nutty ideas regarding the possibilities of a hollow earth, world ice, and racial supremacy, in which context, Fort's baroque bullshit seems less charming. As Willy Ley wrote from his own experience in Pseudoscience in Naziland, as published in Astounding back in 1947:

When things get so tough that there seems to be no way out, the Russian embraces the vodka bottle, the Frenchman a woman and the American the Bible.

The German tends to resort to magic, to some nonsensical belief which he tries to validate by way of hysterics and physical force. Not every German, of course. Not even a majority, but it seems to me that the percentage of people so inclined is higher in Germany than in other countries. It was the willingness of a noticeable proportion of the Germans to rate rhetoric above research and intuition above knowledge, that brought to power a political party which was frankly and loudly anti-intellectual. The Nazis not only burned books they disliked, they also classified theoretical physicists with Jews and Marxists.

Small wonder the pseudoscientists experienced a heyday under such a regime — but it would be a mistake to believe that these pseudosciences which I am going to describe, originated with the Nazis. They existed, and to some extent even flourished, before Hitler. But then they were hemmed in by the authority of the scientists—after Hitler had become Führer it was almost the other way round.

I'm not trying to suggest, that pseudoscience is necessarily dangerous in itself, but it can be symptomatic of a certain strain of fuckwittery which has proven itself historically conducive to the rise of dangerous mad cunts; and Fort's crowing whilst stood on such thin ice was never a good look. Nor, I might argue, was it particularly helpful in shedding any light upon that which he purports to investigate, and which seems deserving of better than either sneering dismissal or Fort's own fevered patronage.

Strange Creatures from Time and Space

John Keel Strange Creatures from Time and Space (1975)
I read this when I was a kid, as borrowed from a friend at school whose dad was obsessed with such things and had a UFO detector in his back garden - procured through the classifieds in Abduction Monthly or something of the sort. I found a copy in Hay-on-Wye when in my twenties I'd taken to reading more or less just comic books and UFO literature. This changed when I discovered Richard Dawkins around 1995 and went a bit fundamentalist for a while. I got rid of all my crackpot paperbacks but always regretted ditching this one, plus a few by Brad Steiger. Keel and Steiger always seemed to deliver the goods, regardless of whether or not you actually believed any of it.

Here John Keel takes the position that UFOlogy and related paranormal investigations have been historically held back by a desire for logic, or at least for accounts which we can just about believe because they hint at some sort of science-fiction narrative with which we are already familiar - visitors from the stars and so on. Clearly he has a point, and it seems that many well-known accounts of unexplained phenomenon have often left out the weirder details for fear of ridicule; leaving us with the amusing possibility that the more hypothetically probable accounts are going to be the least plausible because anyone feeling inclined to just make something up for chuckles isn't going to bother trying to fence some of the wacky shit related herein as anything which could really happen - therefore maybe it did. John Keel is very much in the tradition of Charles Fort as one who chronicles the improbable or impossible for the sheer joy of contradicting consensus reality.

That said, whilst he writes well and generally stands head and shoulders above most of his contemporaries, Keel is himself not without his blind spots. Much literature of this kind has an unfortunate habit of fixating on established science as the enemy so as to forge a bond with the more paranoid readers who never trusted those book-learnin' guys in the first place. It needs science to be its enemy to the point of refusing even to negotiate, because negotiations will inevitably work in the favour of the other side. Most crucially, science as a scapegoat shifts focus from the fact that there's really not much to say about the bloke who insists he saw a strange light in the sky and it didn't seem like a plane and then he felt a bit funny.

Keel tends not to dwell on the sceptics so much as others often do, but still descends to pointless sniping at what he describes as Type B scientists. Type A are the ones who invent shit, the guys you're not going to pick a fight with because you'll end up looking like a fucking idiot - Edison, Einstein and so on. Type B scientists are the university types which television stations call in when something needs denouncing as light from the planet Venus refracted through swamp gas; or in one specific case to suggest that something weird found washed up on a beach might be the supposedly more prosaic remains of a recently defrosted mammoth, prompting Keel to fume accordingly:

The iceberg hypothesis is not merely unscientific, it is moronic. So far as is known, no animal - modern or prehistoric - has ever been found encased in a floating iceberg.

Which is great except that he invokes the same frozen in an iceberg explanation for some other peculiar beastie discussed a couple of pages later, so it's fine when he makes certain suggestions...

Happily, there's not too much of this kind of defensive argument, and even if he doesn't state it directly, I would guess that Keel appreciates there's not much joy to be had in pouring scorn upon the laws of physics. Indeed, his strength is that he thinks about his subject and even engages in a degree of scepticism over and above that which is customarily adopted by UFOlogists aspiring to present a ludicrous veneer of scientific rigour, a veneer of scientific rigour which tends to exclude all the wackier tales.

The buffs tend to lump everything hopelessly together and try only to categorise the descriptions of the objects which are, as we pointed out earlier, so varied that the data negates itself. We must, to be successful, turn our attention to studying the witnesses and the psychological and physiological effects they experience. The answer to the whole mystery probably lies in that direction, not in the stars.

Leaving aside the major problem that what we have here are essentially anecdotal accounts of anecdotal evidence, this book works because much of this stuff is bananas - hence hugely entertaining, even thought-provoking, and genuinely scary in a few cases - and because while Keel speculates aplenty, he avoids didactic conclusions and never assumes the reader to be either an idiot, or even necessarily on his side.

As to whether I've just re-read a couple of hundred pages of nothing at all, I just don't know. A great many of these accounts describe events which seem to have the logic of a dream or a hallucination - winged creatures rising into the air without said wings actually flapping, for one example - but hallucinations shared by a number of people; and then there are the parallels - similar stories of similar occurrences told by people who have never met. In certain respects we don't actually know much about the human brain and almost certainly hold an excess of faith in what is generally regarded as objective experience, as distinct from the imagined. I'm inclined to wonder if visions of - for example - mothmen with glowing red eyes, might simply turn out to be a glitch of consciousness, just as certain phantom odours can sometimes signify more serious neurological problems; but there doesn't seem to be a single simple explanation for any of this stuff which covers everything, not even the possibility of it all having been made up. The best that can be said is that one hell of a lot of people appear to have experienced something weird, regardless of whether that experience was real in objective terms; and of all people, John Keel does a great job of trying to beat some sense out of the subject.