This
week I talked with Nick Redfern about his new book, The Alien Book” A Guide
to Extraterrestrial Beings on Earth. It is a huge compendium of tales of
alien creatures, some of them who might have originated on other planets. Nick
explains this in the course of our discussion. You can listen to the interview
here:
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| Nick Redfern. |
However,
he was also of the opinion that some the creatures we think of as terrestrial,
might not be from Earth. We talked about the theory that the Loch Ness Monster
might be some sort of alien creature, based on the number of UFO sightings in
the area. Sure, we understood that sightings of UFOs don’t mean that the
monster was alien, only that lots of people had seen UFOs around Loch Ness. But
then, we also talked about the recent release of DNA evidence that suggested
the monster was a giant eel. Of course, eels have been seen in the Loch for
decades so that this was no real revelation because they had no pictures of a
giant eel.
We
also talked about the Flatwoods Monster from 1952. Nick had mentioned, in his
book, that the monster resembled a British psychological operation during the
Second World War. We talked about a paper prepared in the late 1940s that
examined such ideas. You can read it here:
This
led us to the Mothman sightings in the 1960s and eventually into the idea of a
race of beings, human or otherwise, that inhabit the Earth with us but remain
in hiding. In other words, we talked about just a few of the cases, a little of
the information, and some of the theories that are found in the book.
Oh,
for those interested, I did open the show with updates from the Mike Rogers
interview. Just a couple of points we hadn’t covered and things I thought would
interest some of the listeners.
Next
week, I’ll be talking with Paul Davids who was the executive producer of the
Show Time original movie, Roswell and who has been interested in UFOs
since the 1980s. If you have questions for Paul, as always, you can ask them in
the comments section here and I’ll try to get them answered during the
interview.
The Loch Ness Monster. An Alien. My god, this guy cant see that the whole thing was a hoax perpetuated by newspaper sales, I mean seriously that is just about the stupidest suggestion in 'ufology', and there are plenty.
ReplyDeleteIf you look at the Rand report, it references public sources of data and specifically a book written by Magician Maskelyne called "Magic-Top Secret". It is treated in the Rand report as truth. It has many anecdotes and photos and really leads you to believe he is telling the truth. But I can't confirm any of it.
ReplyDeleteThe funny thing is that in searching for a library that could provide a copy, I found that there were copies of his book in the US Army Military History Institute, the Defense Intelligence Agency library, Library of the Marine Corps, Ike Skelton Combined Arms Research Library, USAICoE Military Intelligence Library, US Army, Field Artillery School. So, maybe the government believes it.
But I DID find a copy to read.
To illustrate his claims, in one story from chapter 2, he says he was in charge of setting up the illusion/camouflage of fake military personnel and hardware on the British shoreline, thus preventing German invasion in 1940! Anyone got proof on that one?
In chapter 4, he describes inventing (and he shows photographs to prove it was built) a spotlight beam that was tested to show it can disorient pilots. Because of the pictures, it might have been built, but I have never heard it being used then or today. He says 21 such lights were built for the Suez Canal region. Later in the book (Chapter 22), he says the same devise was built to mount on tanks when the Allied Forces invaded the Continent. I never heard of this.
In Chapter 2 was another amazing pronouncement of having invented (and it was used) a "Red Cross" paint scheme to enhance its visibility (red on yellow instead of red and white) to prevent ships from being bombed by the Germans (and visa versa). This does not seem true.
Chapter 4 has him using camouflage to successfully "hide" Alexandria harbor by creating a fake city a little way off. So successful, he says the technique was exported to England to protect cities! Never heard of this either.
In Chapter 5 he describes in a believable story how he camouflaged a tank to look like a truck so well it fooled trained military from "a few feet away". This might be possible.
In Chapter 7 he devises and tests on himself in front of witnesses a fire resisting paste which he tested by immersion into the flames of a burning hulk of an airplane. Sort of sounds believable, but I never have seen it since.
In Chapter 8 he somehow creates 258 foot long submarines to make the enemy think the Allies have sea power that isn't there. Also, they produced one fake battleship (out of cardboard, canvas), 700 feet long, placed on an old cruiser! Really?
I would definitely recommend the book if you can find it because it is amusing even if not true.
One other author of a book on Maskelyne is David Fisher, "The War Magician: The True Story of Jasper Maskelyne". http://www.dfisher.com/ He seems to still be alive and writing, but I have not got a chance to read this one.
I would not take the Rand report as factual and indeed I doubt they did any fact checking of their source. Maskelyne either was a great war hero and saved thousands of lives or was a fictional writer. It is hard to say which.
Here is the excerpt of the scarecrow illusion taken from his book and repeated in the Rand report.
"... they used a device which was little more than a gigantic scarecrow, about twelve feet high, and able to stagger forward under its own power and emit frightful flashes and bangs. This
thing scared several Italian Sicilian villages appearing in the dawn thumping its deafening way down their streets with great electric blue sparks jumping from it ..."
The only similarity with the Flatwoods monster seems to be the height. Flatwoods did not stagger, emit bangs or frightfully flashed or sparked. Flatwoods "bounded", gave off gas, glowed. Also, Maskelyne offers no details on how it was made, so it was doubtful if it ever was.
I think you'll find that the idea of the Loch Ness Monster being a space alien first cropped up in the 1975 Doctor Who serial "The Terror Of The Zygons", in which Tom Baker's Doctor made the interesting discovery that Nessie was not only an extraterrestrial from the planet Zygor, but to everyone's even greater surprise, a mammal, since the Zygons had taken the enormous beast with them on their interstellar voyage to provide fresh milk! After which the revelation that she was also an indestructible cyborg came almost as an anticlimax.
ReplyDeleteSadly the participation of Nessie herself in the action is extremely limited, since the not-so-special effects turned out so badly, even by the standards of seventies Doctor Who, that most of her scenes were excised or trimmed as much as they could be without the story becoming incomprehensible. But she does get to almost eat London.
I think you'll also find that the large number of UFO sightings near Loch Ness has quite a lot to do with the fact that once a place acquires a reputation for strange goings-on, the kind of people who flock there tend to be more likely to see spaceships than the average person, though they would of course self-identify as "open-minded" and "psychically receptive" rather than gullible and fantasy-prone.
Therefore the conclusion that, because the kind of people who see dinosaurs swimming in Scottish lakes sometimes see flying saucers while looking for dinosaurs, Nessie must be connected with space aliens, isn't quite as logical as you perhaps think it is. Similar objections can be raised to MUFON's claim that, since a staggering 88% of the alien abductees they've studied also believe (amongst many other extraordinary things) that they live in houses haunted by poltergeistes, little grey men from Zeta Reticuli cause ghosts, and/or vice versa.
Oh, and the recent suggestion that Nessie might be a giant eel? I think you'll find that the scientific team involved were misleadingly quoted by the tabloid media. Their actual conclusions were that, of all the DNA they found in the waters of Loch Ness, the only creature whose presence they were able to confirm which could, under any circumstances at all, conceivably be mistaken for a plesiosaur was the humble eel. Therefore if - and it's a very, VERY big if - Nessie is a real animal, she must be an eel which has somehow grown implausibly huge (the European eel can very rarely grow to a length of 5 feet but is usually about half that size), because there's simply nothing else living in those waters that she could possibly be. Unless of course it doesn't have DNA as we know it.
Which is a handy get-out clause, because if Nessie is an interdimensional magic water dragon from Fairyland, or indeed a giant robot space cow from the planet Zygor, you wouldn't expect her to have anything resembling terrestrial DNA. So the problem doesn't arise, does it?
I expect Nick Redfern will explain this to you next year, when he's written another 15 books and can't remember what he pretended to think was true in this one, in the same way that he seems to think that whatever crashed at Roswell was at least two mutually contradictory objects.
Go on, ask him about the Roswell UFO again after he's scribbled a few more potboilers and forgotten what he said he believed it was last time. It'll be a Magonian skyship full of dead fairies, or Glenn Miller's missing aircraft displaced through space and time by the hithero unknown Vile Vortex in tbe English Channel, or something like that. Just you wait and see!
In Ardy Clarke's 4 books there are a total of 134 stories. Might be interesting to do a quantative analysis and discerning the patterns from them.
ReplyDeleteMike J