An hour later, with ten more miles and the visit to the World's Biggest Drugstore safely behind us, we were back at home, and I had returned to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as "being in one's right mind."
Jon Ronson is a highly successful British journalist who has carved out something of a niche for himself documenting the shadow world of fringe belief communities for a sardonic middle-class audience. Developing a style which mixes the participatory character of Gonzo journalism with a particularly British sense of self-deprecatory humour, Ronson's most successful works include The Men Who Stared at Goats, an exploration of the US military's study of New Age and paranormal techniques, and Them: Adventures with Extremists, a picaresque account of his experiences in the company of individuals such as David Icke, Randy Weaver, and Alex Jones. (A movie version of The Men who Stared at Goats, with George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, and Kevin Spacy, is slated for a November release, while Universal and Jack Black have apparently bought the rights to Them.)
Ronson's take on fringe topics is a little too sardonic, commonsensical, and basically sane for my liking, but he has done some good work, including infamously infiltrating the New World Order summer soiree Bohemian Grove with Texan conspiracy firebrand Alex Jones. Way back in 1998, Ronson hosted For the Love of....Big Brother on Britain's then edgy and alternative Channel 4. Airing well into the late night/early morning stoner slot, For the Love of.... basically gathers a motley panel of remote viewers, spook-watchers, and etheric healers, to discuss the New World Order, microwave weapon technology, remote viewing, and advanced surveillance techniques. While most of these topics are quite familiar to today's paranoia saturated culture, to a random pre-9 11 audience of insomniacs and students, this must have seemed like pretty mind-blowing stuff. I love the little details that date the programme – Ronson smokes throughout, which just never happens in panel TV today, and the panellists quaintly regard mobile phones as solely the preserve of the wealthy upper class. (Tune into Channel 4 late at night today, and you are likely to be transported into the sickly retro-futurist design of the Big Brother "reality TV" house, an annual media event that turns the constant surveillance state, and the dystopian nightmare imagery of the twentieth century, into fetishistic mass entertainment. Strange times.)
The scholar of the paranormal is perpetually bedevilled by the ingenuity of the hoaxer and the charlatan. Our august discipline suffers in two significant ways. First of all, there is the question of credibility, and the perception of us within the wider academic and scientific communities. It seems that once man first longed for the miraculous, the numinous, and the mysterious, he became subject to the confusing topography of what I label the labyrinthine bazaar of the spirit. Consider, my friends, the ambience of the ordinary bazaar: a bustling, gaudy emporium of tent and stall, where traders entice the weary buyer with a wealth of purely material fare – with such clothing, ornament, and bauble as renders the human body itself a marketable commodity, and such roasted nuts, sweetmeats, and mulled wines as satisfy the shopper's delicate palette. It is certain that some of the traders charge an exorbitant fee for their wares, and practise all kinds of wiles to induce the buyer to make a strumpet of his purse. (The common expression to sell the sizzle, not the steak, actually derives from a real practise. In the Moroccan bazaars of the late Medieval period, the trader Ishmael Alveretto was avowed the pinnacle of diabolical ingenuity in matters of persuasion. The most famous of all his feats was the ability to sell - at a discount price – bags of steam from his barbecue, under the pretence that the steam contained the concentrated nutrients of the meat, and sufficed for a meal when inhaled. It is said that he was eventually set upon by a mob of his erstwhile gulls, who had grown emaciated from months of inhaling Alveretto's steam, and the salesman himself was burned alive.) Nevertheless, the merely physical bazaar possesses an essential honesty, but what of the metaphysical one? Witness the decadence of the Church in in the late medieval period, reduced to a high street boutique of the afterlife, trading in indulgences, relics, and the presumptuous exchange of purgatorial leniency for hard currency. The Dominican preacher Johann Tetzel (1465 – 1519) is credited with the zeitgeist-defining couplet “As soon as a coin in the coffer rings/the soul from purgatory springs.” Stroll beyond the Catholic concordance of the spiritual bazaar, and one finds oneself in the bold hub of the Age of Reason, lost in a deafening babble of mesmerists, theosophists, rogue geometricians of the Fourth Dimension, etheric and mediumistic parlour conmen of every persuasion. To this day, the study of the anomalous and the strange has had its credibility damaged by the shamelessness of the spiritual huckster, and the inveterate credulity of his gulls. Further to this, the prevalence of hoaxing provides another pressing difficulty for the paranormal community, and this second difficulty lies in the ratio of signal to noise. Consider, for example, the UFO phenomenon. It is often said that the study of UFOs is bedevilled by a high preponderance of noise to signal, the noise in this case being defined as elements of the UFO enigma which are rationally explicable unknowns, as against the signal of truly anomalous events. A class of physical noise is generated by the misidentification of ordinary aerial vehicles, planetary bodies, and atmospheric phenomenona. A class of intellectual or sociological noise is generated by cultural and journalistic sensationalism, urban legendry and folklore, deliberate government misinformation, and generally speaking, the whole corpus of socio-mythic pollution which influences, or even creates ex nihilo, a particular interpretative bias. When we ad to this intellectual noise the prevalence of hoaxes, it becomes easy to imagine that perhaps the subject under study does not exist at all, but is rather a complex self generating feed-back system, a concordance of error and misidentification which continues to evolve in complexity as the pursuit of one erroneous assumption generates another. (Some wise men have avowed that the whole corpus of knowledge and science may itself be such a self generating feed-back system. This is the problem of the circularity of truth, which is so admirably expressed by William James: “There is no noncircular set of criteria for knowing whether a particular belief is true, no appeal to some standard outside the process of coming to the belief itself. For thinking just is a circular process, in which some end, some imagined outcome, is already present at the start of any train of thought....Truth happens to an idea, it becomes true, is made true by events.” Attend to the nuance; these words are particularly germane to our theme.)
To what category of ontology does the UFO belong, being so complex, treacherous, and potentially illusionary? True scholars of the mystery have invariably found that it is a liminal, twilight category; that it seems to maintain its existence somewhere between the realm of exterior physical reality, and interior psychological projection. It remains impossible to prove, perhaps even to fully credit, yet equally impossible to fully reject. The pre-eminent French ufologist Jacques Vallee recognised this liminal ontology as perhaps the defining characteristic of the UFO: “they exist in the domain of the in-between, the unproven and the unprovable......the country of paradoxes, strangely furnished with material “proofs”, sometimes seemingly unimpeachable, yet insufficient....this absolutely confusing (and manifestly misleading) aspect may well be the phenomenon's most basic characteristic.” We are drawn, invariably, into the paradoxical world of the Cretan liar, into the timeless machinations of the trickster, perhaps our most indelible and mysterious mythic archetype. But to what avail? What does it mean for something to be neither fully real, nor entirely unreal? If it is true that men create this world, to a certain degree, by virtue of certain pre-exist categories within their brains, and wider sociological categories of consensus which these brains have agreed among themselves, is it possible that the errant creatures of human belief could attain a transitory, residual existence within this matrix? Or does it go further than this? It seems that the notion of objectivity, or of a physical universe wholly unaltered by the prism of consciousness, is the primary paradigmatic casualty of the modern age. Is the next Copernican revolution to be one which will fundamentally alter our conception of the nature of matter, and its relationship to consciousness? And if this is the case, are the flying saucers and other similarly paradoxical phenomenona a kind of koan designed to nudge us towards the collapse of old and untenable categorical distinctions?
As all these questions remain relevant when we consider the ontological status of hoaxes, particularly those of a particular degree of complexity. Do hoaxes remain, as they have begun, harmless and entirely unreal? Or do they partake of an unconscious black magic, a blurring of ontological category, a tripping of some essential switch in the building blocks of reality, that grants them, like the homunculus of alchemical lore, a life of their own?
Reptilians Allegedly Witnessed at Montauk Airforce Base, Long Island.
If you visit the website Expansions run by Stewart Swerdlow and his wife Janet, you'll find a fairly innocuous and stereotypical amalgam of New Age/Self Help sales pitches. Expansions offers to help “YOU harness the infinite power of your mind.” Located on the “crystal leaden beaches of Lake Michigan, a natural step-up transformer surrounded by ancient copper mines and the energetic vortex of the Great Lakes”, Stewart and Janet offer a series of life-altering seminars which run a fairly typical gamut of the paranormal and human potential movements. A teaching schedule for this October carries the following blurb “Everyone has unexplainable experiences at one time or another. Find the answers to the REAL mysteries of life in this fascinating experiential seminar. From the Crystal Skulls to Spontaneous Combustion to Immortality NOTHING is left out....if you've got a question, we've got the answer.” Montauk Radar Tower.
Operating on the outer edge of fringe belief, Stewart Swerdlow claims to have been a participant in the notorious Montauk Project. The Montauk Project, like the Philadelphia Experiment to which it is often linked, is one of the wilder vagaries of American Conspiracy lore. The basic core of the belief is that a series of experiments in mind control, teleportation, parallel dimensions, and time travel were carried by the US government within Montauk Airforce Station on Long Island. Weirdly enough, we now know that the US military did dabble to a certain degree in all of these things, so so far the tale is not entirely beyond the realm of the possible. However, the Montauk mythos was continually expanded and elaborated in various retellings and revisions, until it became a insane palimpsest of conspiracism, incorporating Nazi gold, worm-holes in time and space, communication with extraterrestrials via a hyperspatial language of glyphs and archetypes, and cameo appearances by John von Neumann, Nikola Tesla, and the usual assortment of Greys, Reptilians, and Nordics. (I will present a more thorough treatment of the Montauk mythos in a later post.)
Stewart Swerdlow insists that he lived through all this madness, claiming it had a devastating impact on his private life, resulting in years of “severe illness, broken relationships, and premature Kundalini activation.” (Do not worry unduly, Stewart, with regard to premature Kundalini activation; I have been assured that it happens to all guys from time to time.) Nevertheless, those trying years furnished Stewart with a unique insight into the workings and history of the Illuminati/New World Order, an insight Stewart shares with George Noory in this scintillating Coast to Coast interview. Sample exchange: Swerdlow: Autism is really being a dolphin in a human body, to all intents and purposes. Noory: This is wild stuff, Stewart....
For whatever reasons, ideas of theatricality and fakery have hovered over the Apollo 11 landing from the very beginning, with some suggesting that Hollywood operated as a subtle whistle blower to the deception. The first significant AHT book, We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle by Bill Kaysing, was released in 1974. However, three years earlier, United Artists released Diamonds are Forever, the seventh James Bond film. (Amusing trivia: actor Michael Gambon was considered for the role of Bond, but apparently told producer Albert R. Broccoli that he was “in terrible shape” and had “tits like a woman.”) For the most part, it was business as usual for Bond, albeit with a cruder and campier tone than previous outings. However, upon infiltrating the villain's lair in the Nevada dessert, Bond wonders into the middle of a peculiar rehearsal:
The scene is made all the more weird by the fact that it has no particular relevnace to the overall plot, and isn't really referred to again. However, if Diamonds are Forever was a subtle, blink and you miss it anomaly, Hollywood went into full whistle blower mode in 1978 with the release of Peter Hyams' Capricorn One, a fast-paced conspiracy thriller in which a journalist (Eliot Gould) discovers that a highly publicized live landing on the surface of Mars is a hoax. If I've seen Capricorn One at all, its so long ago that the memory completely escapes me. Watching the trailer, though, its hard not to be struck by how explicitly the movie plays on memories of the Apollo landing:
Indeed, the whole trailer, with its pointed suggestion that mediated history-in-the-making could be wholly fabricated by a ruthless and shadowy conglomerate, is stunningly subversive. Notice particularly the shattering reveal at about 1:09, accompanied by a voice-over which echoes almost word for word the title of Bill Kaysing's 1974 book. (Note also the fact that Capricorn One astronaut OJ Simpson would later stage his own considerable coup in the blurring of the lines between staged spectacle and real-time news.) In his Space Review essay Little red lies, Dwayne A. Day places Capricorn One neatly in the historical context of post-Watergate paranoia in which AHT would continue to flourish: “Capricorn One is the kind of movie which can only be appreciated if you consider the period that it was made, most notably in the years following both Vietnam and Watergate. Peter Hyams had worked as a journalist in Vietnam, where he became convinced that the government would conceal a big lie if top officials wanted to do so. After all, Nixon had waged his “secret war” in Cambodia. Later revelations, such as the Church and Pike congressional investigations which revealed CIA plots to overthrow governments and kill Castro with exploding cigars and poisoned wetsuits only added to the anti-government paranoia. The movie reflects not only distrust of government, but also features the crusading journalist as hero; All the Presidents Men, about Woodward and Bernstein and Watergate, had already been a hit movie two years earlier.”
I remain very reluctant to believe that the moon landings were hoaxed. However, as a resonant contemporary mythology, AHT has a hell of a lot to tell us about our contemporary condition. About our prevalent distrust of official histories, figures of power and authority, even the evidence of what our eyes can see. The lunar footage itself, which appears alternately awe-inspiring and strangely comic, otherworldly and theatrical, reveals the Janus face of technology: its ability to produce an inalienable record of an event, tempered with the awareness of its potential to produce a near perfect fabrication of an event; the inevitable failure of filmic representation to approximate the certainty of experience and reality, when the two, as opposing forces, seem only to deplete one another's potency.
“Just a month before, Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong had left their colleague Michael Collins on-board spaceship Columbia and walked on the moon, beating by five months president Kennedy's goal of putting a man on the moon before the decade was out. The old carpenter asked me if I really believed it had happened. I said sure, I saw it on television. He disagreed; he said he didn't believe it for a moment, that “them television fellers” could make things look real that weren't. Back then I thought he was a crank. During my eight years in Washington, I saw things on television that made me wonder if he wasn't ahead of his time.” Bill Clinton.
The Mission that Never Got Off the Ground. Tag Line for Capricorn One (1978).
Having let the Moon Hoax cat of the bag, I'm going to run with it for one more post. The Apollo 11 landing in 1969 represented on the one hand a palpable expression of something new and quintessentially of the 20th century, and on the other perhaps the last triumphant gasp of something far older. The new thing, beyond the technologies involved in the mission itself, was the manner in which it was experienced as a global media event. By holding the entire developed world a captive audience to a dramatic live spectacle, NASA had instigated a massive groundswell in in the realization of McLuhan's global village, and a tentative first step towards the constant mediation of experience characteristic of the modern period. The older thing was most evident in the planting of the flag. If everything else about the moon landing was futuristic and new, that gesture alone evoked the spirit of exploration and conquest which had essentially lead to the eerily rippled flag planted on the moon. Everywhere on earth had been discovered and mapped, and space was the natural next frontier to extend the human longing for adventure, danger, and fresh horizons. So the Apollo 11 landing was the beginning of one era, and the end of another. And it really was the end; in a fascinating recent piece on NASA by Tom Wolfe, the Right Stuff author asserts “the American space programme, the greatest, grandest, most Promethean – O.K. if I add godlike? - quest in the history of the world, died in its infancy on 10:56 p.m. New York time, on July 20, 1969, the moment the foot of Apollo 11 commander Armstrong touched the surface of the moon.” The gist of Wolfe's piece is that the political will behind the space programme was mired in the mentality of Cold War one-upmanship and nationalistic prestige, and once those very terrestrial /territorial goals had been attained, its interest drifted elsewhere. The funding dried up, and the 20th century's Magellan adventure ended essentially where it should have begun.
There are many ironies here. The global village was the natural consequence of the spirit of exploration here on earth, and its ineluctable end and limit. The moon landing was a globalised event, a giant step for mankind, and yet the flag was a reminder that our space exploration, like that of the oceans and the earth, was a heroic thing that was compromised by grim ulterior motivations – an expansion of our perspective which walked in tandem with the narrow, territorial focus of our minds. As Arthur Koestler put it: “Prometheus reaches out for the stars with an insane grin on his face and a totem symbol in his hand.”
The lunar landing was dogged by conspiracy theories pretty much from the get-go. I'd like to offer a few thoughts on the virulence of this meme. To the post-Watergate world, and more explicitly to the paranoid consciousness of our postmodern period, the AHT (Apollo Hoax theory), like any truly effective myth-cycle, actualises certain core assumptions in how the myth-bearing community views the world. Principal among these assumptions would be They're lying to us! Secondly, the AHT expresses a sense many of us have acquired about the media itself: that it stages events, that it operates under various agendas, including those of propaganda, distraction, indoctrination, and so on. Suspicions about the veracity of the moon landing, like the staged WWF wrestling bouts of the eighties, are an interesting precursor to the general fog of ambiguity that hangs over the modern mediascape. There is a gnostic or Platonic character to the contemporary paranoid consciousness; we envision the media both as a component of, and an ideal metaphor for, a world which appears rigged by unseen forces, and essentially illusionary. The cave is a studio set, and seeing beyond its shadows, escaping the demiurgic prison, is a question of breaking the fourth wall.
On the other hand, the AHT may tell us something about how myths are made in an age where nearly perfect film records are kept of events. Myth-making began within a strictly oral context, and flourished, for obvious reasons, in direct ratio to the sketchiness of historical record-keeping. With this in mind, the existence in the modern period of photographic and film cameras should represent the pinnacle of historical accuracy, and the end of the blank spaces in the record which myths have traditionally exploited. However, we find instead that myth-making adopted a new strategy – it began to exploit the ambiguity, the inherent imperfections, contained in even our most accurate recording mediums. It found its thread to unravel official histories in the blurry spaces, shadows, artefacts, and anomalies of film stock which were now available to be watched and re-watched ad infinitum. This obsessive poring over, and continued exegesis, of newsreel is a common characteristic of the Kennedy, Apollo 11, and 9 11 conspiracy movements, as well as of UFO and planetary anomaly theorists.
Then again, it may have something to do with the character of the footage itself. The lunar landing photos and film footage are absolutely wonderful. They are as ingrained in our collective psyche as the Madonna and the Crucifixion were to the iconographic imagination of previous epochs. They haunted me as a boy, and to this day have the capacity to re-ignite the increasingly unlikely ambition of walking on the moon. And yet there is something, owing perhaps innocently enough to the nature of the moon itself, that renders these images theatrical and staged looking. The faking of the entire process of the moon landing would have been an extraordinarily complex and difficult thing to achieve; almost as difficult, many have argued, as actually getting to the moon for real. But creating the actual lunar footage itself possessed certain advantages for the would-be hoaxer. There was, for example, a minimum of props necessary to create and maintain the illusion: a couple of astronauts, who are masked like Greek tragedians, the lunar module, a few instruments, and the flag. The lunar landscape itself is so remarkably sparse and minimal as to be a set or stage designer's dream: a completely black sky, a arid landscape of uniform colour and consistency, and a steady horizon line which allows for numerous tricks of perspective. ( Even the sunlight on the moon is redolent of theatrical lighting; astronaut Peter Conrad said “The sun's bright, it's like somebody's shinning a spotlight on your hands! I tell you.....it really is! It's like somebody's got a super bright spotlight!”) In summary, the Apollo lunar footage epitomises in every regard the minimum amount of props and visual cues necessary to create a theatrical illusion, like Waiting for Godot in zero gravity:
I also liked to think that founders of religions, prophets, saints and seers had at moments been able to read a fragment of the invisible text; after which they had so much padded, dramatized and ornamented it, that they themselves could no longer tell what parts of it were authentic. Arthur Koestler.
The point I was trying to make, before being overtaken by nostalgic digression, was that crop circles are a relatively new phenomenon. Many cerealogists point to a woodcut and pamphlet, The Mowing Devil, or, Strange News out of Hartford-Shire, published in 1678, which would seem to depict a proto-typical crop circle incident. This pamphlet, which I suspect may resonate a note more of contemporary agrarian unrest than timeless cosmic mystery, recounts the tale of a farmer who becomes enraged at the price a labourer demands to mow his field, and swears that he would sooner suffer the Devil himself to mow his corn. That night the farmer observed his field engulfed in an obsidian flame, and awoke the next morning to found a perfect circle mysteriously sown in the field. (The tale may indeed be true, but the casual student of folklore will instantly recognise a characteristic expression of the rash promise motif, common in folk yarns since the time of Chaucer.)
Some theorists will go back even further along the timeline, and cite the infamous Nazca lines, carved in antiquity into the arid deserts of the Peruvian Pampas de Jumana, as an ancient precursor to the modern crop circle. A perennial staple in the serious study of ancient astronaut theory, the Nazca lines do share many common characteristics with the crop circle: both, roughly speaking, are geoglyphs, or motifs which are worked into the natural constitution of a given ground area. Both are so massive as to necessitate a elevated, aerial perspective in order to become fully sensible as images. While our modern technology allows us to take stock of the crop circle with relative ease, no such provision existed for our Nazca brethren in the years before 700 BCE; consequently, we are none the wiser as to who these massive hummingbirds, spiders, llamas, and lizards were addressed to, to say nothing of what sense they were designed to convey. They are an example of an untranslated, non-verbal language, of which history provides us with countless scattered fragments. These languages are the subject of this post.
It is immediately apparent that, even by stretching the generosity of analogy in this fashion, we can find few genuine precursors to the crop circle phenomenon in our history. Why then do they provoke that peculiar ripple of the ancestral memory-pool which I referred to earlier? A partial explanation is found in the seasonality of the practise. The modern and the pre-modern sensibility are set apart by as many cultural canyons as there are drops of water in the ocean. Nevertheless, I believe the most pervasive and significant of these lies in the perception or experience of time. (Time, whatever it may be, is the great kernel of all mysteries. I believe that identity itself, be it of the individual or the species, is constituted entirely in the active demarcation of temporality. It is for this reason that the seasoned mystic and psychonaut experience as a simultaneous phenomenon the collapse of standard temporal demarcation, and the dissolution of individual, egoistic consciousness, into the apprehension of atemporality and universal identity/non-identity.)
The pre-modern experience of time, like the mandala and the flying saucer, was circular in character. More than this, it was intrinsically connected to seasonal growth cycles of the earth. The earliest expressions of religious ceremony and artistic performance, the two virtually indistinguishable in their nascent forms, were strictly aligned to the change of the seasons. The modern, urban sensibility, though it may experience a rise and diminution of its passions in tandem with the march of the months, or some meagre Pavlovian excitement at the prospect of officially allotted holidays, has for the most part thoroughly lost this seasonal, Gaian consciousness. Crop circles, being an artform of an entirely earthy, evanescent and seasonal character, restore to us something of that sense of endless cyclic return, of constant mutability which is in actuality algorithmic sameness; the grand, slow time of our ancestors.
Yet this mystery runs much deeper. The real allure of the crop circle is that they actualise two interconnected, and apparently perennial longings in the human psyche: the need for an intricate code to crack, and a strange, ubiquitous longing for a pre-verbal, pre-linguistic, visual medium of communication. This fascination expresses itself in an endless variety of forms: our vain attempts to recapture the meaning of the entopic and therianthropic iconography our pre-historical ancestors painted on the caves of Lascaux, Pech Merle, and Altamira; the strange, runic scripts produced in automatic writing by channelers of every persuasion; the self-actualising sigils of ritual magick; various dead, mythic, invented, and allegedly extraterrestrial languages; the arcane symbology associated with alchemy, occultic societies, and glimpsed on the exterior of UFOs and on the uniforms of their occupants; right down to the asemic writing of Brion Gyson and the contemporary avant-garde.
A few brief examples, to get the ball rolling: it is said that in Italy in 1539, a man called Ludovico Spoletano contacted the Devil, and asked him to respond to a question in writing. Ludovico claims that once the question was asked, a pen was taken up by “an invisible power which seemed suspended in the air”, and rapidly wrote the following:
In 1583, Edward Kelley, the alchemist/charlatan and close compatriot of John Dee, allegedly channeled the ur-language of the angels, which was spoken prior to the fall of mankind and the linguistic cataclysm of the Tower of Babel. He called the angelic language Enochian:
In 1985, another Ludovico, this time Granchi, witnessed a massive UFO hover over his home in Rio de Janeiro. As Granchi watched the craft, a brightly lit panel covered with black symbols, resembling a holographic projection, was revealed to him. Granchi felt a peculiar compulsion to copy down the symbols, and a sense of “dire” importance that he be as accurate as possible. To date, the alien symbols of Ludovico Granchi have not been decoded:
While it is clear that there is much of charlatanry in these arcane symbols, and more of a kind of meaningless subconscious scribbling, they nevertheless exercise a peculiar fascination over the imagination. We can never be sure when the medium, shaman, or schizophrenic has merely brought back scraps from the refuse bin of the mind, or whether, among his travels in this trash spectrum, he has chanced onto some higher frequency of possibly genetically encoded or extraterrestrial information; some fragment of the invisible text, the great, alchemical unravelling of the mystery of ourselves, which wants only to be pieced together. Witness the example of the Swedish artist Hilma Af Klint. At the turn of the century, Miss Klint presided over a circle of women who claimed to receive messages from “ascended masters.” Klint produced many paintings derived from the etheric messages she was receiving, but two years before her death was told: “Protect your drawings. They are pictures of drenching waves of ether that await you one day when you're eyes and ears can apprehend a higher summoning.” The following painting was called “What a Human Being Is”, and was produced some fifty years before the discoveries of Francis Crick and James Watson:
Jon Ronson is a highly successful British journalist who has carved out something of a niche for himself documenting the shadow world of fringe belief communities for a sardonic middle-class audience. Developing a style which mixes the participatory character of Gonzo journalism with a particularly British sense of self-deprecatory humour, Ronson's most successful works include The Men Who Stared at Goats, an exploration of the US military's study of New Age and paranormal techniques, and Them: Adventures with Extremists, a picaresque account of his experiences in the company of individuals such as David Icke, Randy Weaver, and Alex Jones. (A movie version of The Men who Stared at Goats, with George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, and Kevin Spacy, is slated for a November release, while Universal and Jack Black have apparently bought the rights to Them.)
