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The Power of Vril: From Meat Paste To Nazi UFOs, British Writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton Unwittingly Invented Perfect Substance To Fuel Conspiracy Theories

It was a dark and stormy night …

It’s perhaps the most infamous opening phrase for a novel, made an object of scorn by sniffing literary snobs who have decided this line is the, “archetypal example of florid, melodramatic fiction writing style.” A Writer’s Digest article called it, “the poster child for bad story starters.”

It rolled off the pen of British writer EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON to start his 1830 novel, Paul Clifford. I might also mention that Bulwer-Lytton is credited with originating numerous eloquent phrases, such as, “the pen is mightier than the sword,” and, “the almighty dollar.”

This latter phrase comes from the novel I am reviewing today, THE COMING RACE, which Bulwer-Lytton first published anonymously in 1871. This book came out near the end of his literary career and life – Edward Bulwer-Lytton died in 1873.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

The Coming Race is a peculiar work of fiction, but one might argue the book has gone on to become the most influential of Bulwer-Lytton’s more than 30 novels. That influence is driven by its central fictional invention, a mystical force or power called “Vril.”

This concept of Vril was seized upon by certain esoteric and metaphysical groups that were emerging in the late 19th Century. Subsequently, the fascination with Vril was revived years later — (supposedly – read on) — by other groups in post-World War I Europe, especially those involved in in the Nazi pseudoscience movements that purportedly played a role in the rise of Adolph Hitler.

Furthermore, Vril is at the heart of one of the most persistent veins in what has become a virtual genre within UFO literature and ufology proper – those involving stories surrounding Nazi flying saucer technology powered by Vril. There is even a British brand of meat paste which leverages the concept of Vril. BOVRIL is a combination of the words “bovine” and “Vril.”

Yes, all this from an unremarkable speculative novel cobbled together by an aging writer whose literary heyday had long since come and gone by 1871. So, what’s the book about?

The Coming Race is a novel with almost no plot. The viewpoint character is a bland, unnamed “any man” used only to serve as a narrator. Bulwer-Lytton makes no attempt to make this character come alive with description or background story that would make him a memorable fictional hero.

It’s barely fiction or a novel at all. Rather, the narrative serves a vehicle for Bulwer-Lytton to envision and describe a hidden race of people who live in a Utopian society and to ruminate about what such a society might be like – and perhaps whether Utopia is such a desirable way to live after all.

The hidden society dwells within vast underground caverns where sunlight is unknown. They have no knowledge of the outside world with its billions of people and animals thriving on the surface. The hero of the story stumbled upon the subterranean civilization by accident while exploring a mining operation.

The inner-earth people call themselves the Vril-ya. They take their name from the fantastic energy that has enabled them to master their underground realm. It provides them with unlimited, pollution free power. With Vril, they can light up their entire subterranean environment with lovely angelic light. Vril can also be used in an infinite number of applications, from powering fantastic robotic machinery that does all the grunt work, to curing disease and, of course, serves as the ultimate weapon.

In a kind of technological determinism, Vril has allowed the Vril-ya to rid their society of all strife, economic inequality and class division. Greed and war are unknown. Material want is nonexistent. That’s because every citizen of the Vril Society has equal access and full command of Vril. With Vril, every individual can easily have everything they want so there is no need for struggle – and no motivation to act aggressively toward others to take what they have.

Bulwer-Lytton spends chapter after chapter describing all aspects of Vril-ya society, much the way an anthropologist might write a nonfiction account of an indigenous people living in a remote corner of the planet. The narration is often mind-numbingly dry – as is the long chapter in which Bulwer-Lytton describes the Vril-ya language, complete with a grammatical analysis parsing the fine points of usage, including base forms, causative verbs, demonstrative pronouns … and on and on.

British meat paste named for Vril

The narrator engages in lofty discussions with the Vril-ya elite on various aspects of social theory, religion and philosophy. There are some anemic attempts to insert an element of cleverness. For example, Bulwer-Lytton flips the role of the sexes making Vril-ya women the dominant sex in both physical prowess and command of sexual relationship issues. But all this is always carefully couched in a context of everyone and every aspect of Vril-ya culture having achieved a perfect universal equality.

Madam Blavatsky, Co-Founder of Theosophy

So, reading this from my vantage point of 150 years later, The Coming Race seems an unremarkable, exceedingly bland exercise in the long tradition of a special genre of fiction known as Utopian literature – except that the central concept of Vril proved to have an uncanny captivating effect on certain segments of society that were emerging in the late 1800s.

Among the most significant of these was Theosophy, an esoteric religious movement founded by the Russian-born mystic Madam Blavatsky. While Blavatsky accepted The Coming Race nominally as a work of fiction, she was convinced that Vril was something that was real. She and others came to believe that Bulwer-Lytton wittingly or unwittingly had described an ancient universal force that has always been the birthright of the human race. She believed the possession of this power was latent in all people, but that knowledge of it had somehow become lost, forgotten or hidden over past centuries.

It became a widespread belief that Bulwer-Lytton was a member of some mega-secret occult society from which he had gained special, “insider” knowledge. That’s mostly false – we know this because he vehemently said so – in writing.

A symbol of the Rosicrucian Order

It’s true that he was well-known to be a member of the ROSICRUCIAN order, a group based around “esoteric truths if the ancient past.” But the Rosicrucians are largely a known quantity. Their teachings, while esoteric, mystical and arcane, are not a deep source of mystery. Anyone can join the Rosicrucians, study their knowledge and precepts as laid out in the Rosicrucian Manifestos. I am not a Rosicrucian, but I have a close friend who is a long-time member and very high up in the organization today. He gave me extraordinary access to the inner workings of this organization.

Based on my own study of the Rosicrucian Manifestos – and I have had read them all — it is easy to see how Bulwer-Lytton could have extracted the concept of Vril from this voluminous body of ancient teachings.

But no matter. Once Vril was embraced by the Theosophists and other mystics and writers, the “Vril Genie” was out of the bottle. The concept of Vril crept osmosis-like throughout various segments of society. Vril lived on to evolve a life and legacy of its own – much of it based on misinformation, newly created myths and poorly conceived conspiracy theories. With the advent of the Internet, Vril truly found the nutrient-rich, fertile environment and nuclear grow-juice it needed to blossom – or metastasize – into a full-blown, unstoppable modern mythology.

Maria Orsic. A real person?

Just log onto YouTube today and search on Vril and you’ll be taken to hundreds of videos connecting Vril with Nazi’s and UFOs. You’ll find copious information on “The Vril Society” – which almost certainly never existed – and even scads of information about a woman said to be the founder of the Vril movement. That woman is identified as MARIA ORSIC. She is said to be a Vienna-born, ethnically Croatian medium who became a German national and then somehow tapped into Vril. She used it to make contact with aliens from a solar system surrounding the star Aldebaran, a red giant and brightest star in the Constellation Taurus. The Aldebaran aliens, in turn, were able to channel information through the mediumship of Maria Orsic that gave the Nazi’s instructions on how to build flying saucers.

Pictures of Maria Orsic are also widely circulated. She’s a stunningly beautiful woman of classic Nordic or Aryan features. But these images are clearly not real photographs. At best, they are doctored photos of a model enhanced to make her look like a perfect specimen from an ancient, forgotten race such as Bulwer-Lytton’s Vril-ya.

The kicker is that we actually know the true origin of Maria Orsic. She is little more than a fictional character created in a book written by two Frenchmen, Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels. The book is titled The Morning of the Magicians, published in 1960. These writers are also responsible for inventing the myth of the Vril Society, which was supposedly an inner circle group within the Thule Society. (By the way, the Thule Society was a real, Nazi-era group).

Are you following all this? If you’re not, don’t worry about it. I’m crunching a gigantic amount of information here into just a few paragraphs. The point is, I find it remarkable how Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s entirely average yarn about an imagined Utopian race living beneath the surface of the earth became the seed for an entire school of conspiracy theory that has now claimed a major position in the world of ufology.

But there is one more factor to consider—and this gets back to Madam Blavatsky – who was probably right when she intuitively perceived the way Bulwer-Lytton framed the idea of Vril was inspired by a genuine ancient truth.

The uncanny appeal of Vril may have its roots in that it represents and archetypal-charged reality – and the collective unconscious mind of humanity knows that Vril truly does exist. The concept keeps re-emerging in our stories, myths and legends again and again. Consider “The Force” in Star Wars. Would this series of mediocre “science fiction lite” space opera films have resonated with the public in such a massive way without the underpinning plot device of “The Force?” Not likely.

From ancient Hindu tradition we find something called PRANA. This is defined as the “life force” or the “vital principle” that “underlies all reality. The Chinese, wholly independent of Hinduism, put forward the concept of QI which is virtually indistinguishable from prana.

Zero-Point Energy

Even mainstream material science is in the game. The Holy Grail of physics today is unlocking the secrets that will finally give us access to the ubiquitous, unlimited, pollution free power of ZERO POINT ENERGY – and what is zero-point energy, if not Vril?

So, in the end, let’s save a measure of respect for Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton. He’s become the unfortunate butt of jokes today thanks to “It was a dark and stormy night …” But at the height of his literary power he produced books of extraordinary value and meaning. For example, I consider his The Last Days of Pompeii to be a work on par with, say, a Gore Vidal or James Michener.

He was an intellectual and excellent scholar who published his first book at age 15. From his alma matter, Trinity Hall, he received the prestigious Chancellor’s Gold Medal for English verse. He was also a gifted statesman and served as an MP in the Whig party for a decade. He was chosen as Secretary of State for the Colonies, one of the most powerful positions in 19th Century British government.

He was a self-made millionaire after being cut off from his inheritance because he married for love, a beautiful Irish woman, over the objection of his mother. Statesman, scholar, writer, innovative thinker — Lord Baron Edward Bulwer-Lytton –- the scion of Vril.

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PLEASE CHECK OUT MY REVIEWS OF OTHER BOOKS, LINKED BELOW:

BLACK SWAN GHOSTS by Simeon Hein PhD

SYMBIOSIS by Nancy Tremaine

PASCAGOULA: THE CLOSEST ENCOUNTER by Calvin Parker

INCIDENT AT DEVIL’S DEN by Terry Lovelace

MANAGING MAGIC by Grant Cameron

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Ken Korczak is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer, served as an advocate for homeless people as a VISTA Volunteer, and taught journalism at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: BIRD BRAIN GENIUS

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Physicist Bruce Maccabee Provides Clarity And Important Perspective On How Government/Military Policy Evolved On UFO Issue

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Review by: KEN KORCZAK

Physicist BRUCE MACCABEE has been a significant figure in ufology for some 50 years. He holds a Ph.D. earned from American University, Washington D.C. He is often referred to as an “optics physicist” because of his work with optical data processing for the Naval Ordnance Laboratory, later known as the Naval Surface Warfare Center.

He also worked on underwater lasers to generate subsurface sound and made significant contributions on aspects of SDI, Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” space-based defense platform.

For those of us who have been addicted to UFO stuff for decades, Dr. Maccabee is an instantly recognizable face. Starting in the 1970s he began popping up in UFO documentaries on TV and film, usually as an analyst of anomalous photographs and video.

If Bruce Maccabee pronounced an image or video footage “authentic” or “unexplainable by natural means” – well, that really meant something. With his serious scientific credentials, he could not be written off as just another flake.

Dr. Maccabee is also a dogged researcher who has made enormous efforts to obtain all manner of military and government documents relating to UFOs. A major milestone was getting his hands on the secret “flying disc files” of the FBI – yes, there really was an actual FBI “X-Files.”

Dr. Bruce Maccabee

So, in this short book, THE LEGACY OF 1952: YEAR OF THE UFO, Maccabee offers an important perspective on where things stand in UFO research today, and “how we got here,” for better or worse.

He argues that early on, but especially in the year 1952, certain protocols became set in stone in terms of how our military and government would treat the UFO issue and how they would relate what they knew (or did not know) to the taxpaying public they serve.

Those protocols hardened into “tradition,” Maccabee writes, in 1952 and have remained largely unchanged since. The result is wide ranging and enormous. An entire American generation grew up with a government that either denied the “reality” of the UFO phenomenon … or for any case it could not explain, no matter how sensational, the policy was to suggest it could be explained in common terms if more facts were obtained.

What was so special about 1952? Well, that year witnessed a remarkable explosion of UFO sightings. Thousands of reports poured into media outlets, local police and various government agencies. It seems no location in America was spared.

The most significant is known as the “WASHINGTON FLAP” occurring from July 12 through July 29 in the summer of 1952. It was an amazing time! Suddenly, “swarms of UFOs” began appearing over the American capital city. And it wasn’t just sightings. The objects were routinely captured on radar. Jets were scrambled to pursue the objects. Our best-trained fighter pilots observed UFOs with their own eyes. The “saucers” routinely outdistanced the F-94s and other assets that chased them – and when the jets ran low on fuel forcing them to cut off chase and return – the UFOs would sometimes turn around and come right back!

It was impossible for anyone to be in denial of what was happening!

The sightings were making headlines in major papers across the nation. Also unable to ignore the events was President Harry Truman himself. Truman was alarmed enough to call top people in the Air Force to get some answers.

Stop for a minute and think about that. The President of the United States picks up the phone, calls his Top Brass, and orders them to get some answers about UFOs.

President Harry Truman

What would it take today for the President of the United States to pick up the phone and call his top military commanders to focus urgent attention on getting answers about the UFO issue?

And … and … well, I guess that leads me to my take away from this book. It informs me or, I guess, clarifies for me how we came to be in the place we are today in ufology. Ii helps explain the sort of “crazy labyrinth” that is the “UFO question” in which we find ourselves endlessly lost here in 2019.

Reading Maccabee’s book gave me the notion that a certain normalcy or rationality held sway for a few short years after that June day in 1947 when the Kenneth Arnold sighted nine shiny objects flitting over Mount Rainier, kicking off the modern UFO era.

For example, the press was reporting the UFO story largely in a straightforward way. It was “just that facts, ma’me.” If entire fleets of UFOs were observed over Washington D.C., ordinary, mainstream newspapers, such as the Cedar Rapids Gazette in Iowa, would sport the headline:

“SAUCERS SWARM OVER CAPITAL”

Sure, that’s a sensational headline, but it also happened to be simply factual and true. There was no need to hide it, censor it, spin it, mock it or sugar coat it for the reading public – the media just reported to the people what happened – so that citizens could have this information.

The same goes for the military and government. Early on, a fantastic UFO sighting was not immediately inserted into a meat grinder of denial, disinformation, propaganda or captured into a classified super-double-top-cosmic-secret-for-your-eyes-only-report. Rather, it was confronted directly as a problem for government experts to look at directly as they strove to come up with straightforward answers.

But after 1952 – and because of critical policy decisions made by top government officials in that amazing time – we were all kicked down the proverbial rabbit hole we remain lost in today. That’s mostly what Dr. Maccabee is suggesting in this book.

On the other hand, this is all a much more complex issue. There’s a lot more at play here. For example, the UFO phenomenon has evolved in texture and scope to an astonishing degree since 1952.

Just nine years after 1952, guess what happened? In 1961 a certain couple from Vermont reported they were abducted aboard a UFO by alien beings. They were subjected to medical tests – Barney Hill reported what is arguably the first ever report of an anal probe. His wife, Betty, had a long needled pushed into her belly. Barney was also forced to give a sperm sample.

And then things really got weird.

I have three words for you: “Praying Mantis Alien.” Or how about three more: “20 And Back.” See where I’m going here?

Oh for the days when swarms of flying saucers were blackening the skies over Washington! What simple times!

So, on the one hand, Dr. Maccabee’s book provided for me an excellent sense of sociological clarity and perspective on how the UFO issue developed from the 1950s to present time in terms of government, military, media and public dynamics.

On the other hand, this perspective “stays in its lane,” so to speak, as it represents a narrow slice of the overall phenomenon as it roils and boils today. That’s by no means a knock on Dr. Maccabee’s well-presented book. It provides a compelling narrative which adds to the realization that the UFO phenomenon is not only real, but that the conventional explanations supplied by the skeptics are demonstrably flawed.

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PLEASE CHECK OUT MY REVIEWS OF OTHER UFO BOOKS, LINKED BELOW:

BLACK SWAN GHOSTS by Simeon Hein PhD

SYMBIOSIS by Nancy Tremaine

PASCAGOULA: THE CLOSEST ENCOUNTER by Calvin Parker

INCIDENT AT DEVIL’S DEN by Terry Lovelace

MANAGING MAGIC by Grant Cameron

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Retired Attorney Terry Lovelace Offers A Spell-Binding True Story Of His Lifetime Of Harrowing Alien Abduction

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Review by: KEN KORCZAK

If this UFO book is not one of the most talked about in recent years, it deserves to be. Despite painfully dodgy editing — it’s written in a compelling, lucid style and delivers hair-raising descriptions of alien abduction phenomena.

Oh yes, and there are intriguing photos and X-rays film sheets of what the author believes are alien implants in his leg.

TERRY LOVELACE comes out of obscurity to plant himself center stage among the likes of other famous abductees, such as Travis Walton, Betty and Barney Hill and the two men who were taken aboard a craft in Pascagoula, Mississippi, in 1973 – Calvin Parker and Charles Hickson.

Lovelace is a veteran of the U.S. Air Force. He used the GI bill for law school after an honorable discharge. In addition to private practice, he served as Assistant Attorney General for American Samoa. He kept his UFO story under wraps throughout his professional life, he says, because revealing this information would have been career suicide for a lawyer – which is certainly true. Now that he is retired, he wants his story known.

On the one hand, his details about a lifetime of frightening, intrusive abductions by aliens breaks no new ground – all the familiar elements of what other experiencers have reported for years are here. It’s almost as if he has taken the standard elements of what has become the “UFO abduction genre” and re-told a story deeply familiar to the UFO community.

On the other hand, Mr. Lovelace’s natural talent as a writer and gifted skill for rolling out a compelling narrative will inject a new vividness and feeling of visceral terror for the reader.

In an unexpected way, this latter aspect may unfortunately cut both ways for the author.

What I mean is, this narrative is so well-rendered it will give rise to a higher degree of skepticism among some. Indeed, a negative review on Amazon has already suggested that Mr. Lovelace simply “read a lot of UFO books” and has borrowed all the standard UFO abduction elements to cobble together a riveting fictional tale – which he is passing off as true.

Terry Lovelace

But one would be equally justified in saying that Lovelace is telling the truth because his experience confirms historically well-documented elements of UFO abduction scenarios as reported by thousands of others.

Well, I call myself an “open-minded skeptic” but that does not mean I am a skeptic when it comes to the reality of the UFO phenomena – something is going on that is real, certainly – the evidence is beyond overwhelming.

I take pains to say that because now I want to discuss a central absurdity in the story of Terry Lovelace – not because this makes his tale untrue – but simply because it is absurd – or perhaps suggests a deeper meaning.

I also at this juncture issue a ! SPOILER ALERT ! – I repeat — ! SPOILER ALERT ! – because I want to describe the element of the primary event of his story which was his 1977 abduction experience at Devil’s Den State Park in northwestern Arkansas.

So, if you have not yet read the book – stop reading now. I urge you to go buy the book, read it and come back hear after you have. If you decide to keep reading now – well, I have issued you a fair and unambiguous ! SPOILER ALERT !

THE ABSURDITY

So here is what I find absurd.

Consider: Mr. Lovelace reports that he has been experiencing abductions since childhood. Strange beings which he first perceived as “monkeys” were coming into his bedroom at night. They tormented him with their menacing presence and frightened him to the limit of his ability to withstand the intrusions.

Seeing the cover of Whitley Strieber’s book in a shopping mall sent Terry Lovelace into an unexpected panic. Many others have reported the same mysterious reaction to this book’s cover image.

The “monkeys” are eventually revealed to be the classic Grey aliens. They take him away, bring him back and wipe his memory – except for dreamy trace memories along with lingering fear and a sense of loathing. Later in life he is abducted repeatedly at the whims of his tormentors. They can get him anywhere. They even snatch him once while he’s out riding his motorcycle.

It’s clear the Mr. Lovelace is never safe no matter where he is – be it at home tucked safely in bed, out riding his motorcycle, or anywhere else. Despite this fact the aliens – for some reason — decide to choreograph a fantastically elaborate abduction event in the summer of 1977.

At the time Mr. Lovelace was a young Air Force sergeant serving at Whiteman Air Force Base near Kansas City. The aliens set things in motion weeks before the actual abduction.

They (apparently) telepathically implant a powerful suggestion into the mind of Lovelace and a fellow Airman, Toby, with whom Lovelace serves on an airbase ambulance crew. The aliens want the two men to drive to a remote area in Devil’s Den Park in Arkansas, a six-hour trek from their home base.

The aliens also engineer painstaking details. For example, Lovelace is an avid photographer. He is eager to take spectacular nature photos at Devil’s Den – but he inexplicably forgets his camera on the kitchen table. The suggestion is that the aliens wanted to be sure they were not photographed. A variety of others unusual camping supply snafus occur, as well.

Devil’s Den State Park in Arkansas is home to the largest sandstone crevice area in the United States.

The two men make it to Devil’s Den – but strangely again — they decide to basically trespass on federal land. That is, they don’t go through the park gate, register, purchase an entrance ticket — rather, they circumvent a chain barrier to take a back-way into the parkland, drive their car along some primitive path to a secluded high-elevation meadow.

I’ll skip over some events now – including a long hike the two men take during which they inexplicably fall asleep – and pick it up when the men are sitting by their campfire at night and gazing at the stars. In the night sky they espy three strange “stars” in a triangular formation – and they are mesmerized by them as they slowly drift closer to their camp location.

(NOTE: Just like in the 1976 Allagash abduction of Jim and Jack Weiner in a remote wilderness area of Maine, Lovelace’s buddy Toby “signals” to the UFO with a flashlight as it approaches).

This gradual advance of the strange three stars takes maybe two or three hours. The “stars” turn out to be lights on the corners of a monstrously gigantic triangle-shaped UFO. It’s bigger than a five-story building. It comes to a stop and hovers about 30 feet above the ground near the tent of our campers.

The men are then abducted inside the giant UFO where they are subjected to the usual medical-testing procedures common to abduction stories. They also see 50 to 60 other human beings waiting around to be “processed” or undergoing intrusive exams. They see a lot of other stuff inside the UFO as well, such as fish tanks with bizarre living creatures floating in pink liquid.

Okay – I’ll stop there, and ask this question:

If the aliens have already been abducting Mr. Lovelace at will for his entire life and from any location – right inside his home and often under the noses of his unsuspecting parents, sisters and later his wife – why then the need to lure him out to a remote corner of the wilderness for a clandestine abduction?

Why also bring a behemoth, five-story UFO for Mr. Lovelace when at all other times in his life they have been able to show up in smaller craft and zip him away with ease?

And get this: Lovelace says the aliens made sure that the two men parked their car near the treeline at the edge of the meadow to ensure there would be enough room to land the giant UFO – even though the object never landed, but hovered 30 feet above the ground. An average car is only about 5-feet high. It wouldn’t have been in the way any more than their tent was in the way.

Now here’s another thing: There were 50 or 60 other abducted human beings aboard the UFO. Does that mean all those people also went through the same elaborate pre-abduction ritual of watching three mysterious “stars” in the sky approach them for three hours while they became gradually passive? If they did this for all 50-60 people, the process would have taken days to get all captives aboard.

But if the three-hour pre-abduction ritual was done exclusively for Lovelace and Toby – then why?

I don’t lay out all this information to show that I’m a skeptic – although typical skeptical louts will pounce on the fundamental absurdities of the Devil’s Den abduction to argue that it’s all too preposterous to be true.

A MUFON photo of an anomalous object — “implant” — removed from the body of an alien abduction experiencer.

I am inclined to suggest something else – that because the intensely elaborate choreography of the abduction was unnecessary – it was all theater. And I’m not saying it was a theater production with Terry Lovelace as director – but it was the aliens who put on the show.

For some reason (I keep saying that!) the aliens wanted Mr. Lovelace and his friend to experience a sort of cosmic passion play, complete with George-Lucas-worthy giant spaceships, hordes of fellow frightened abductees and B-movie sci-fi monsters swimming in pink fish tanks.

One must also consider that wiping the memory of Lovelace (conveniently?) failed in the long run. Sinister special agent creeps from the government drugged him and forced him through an ostentatious hypnosis session in which he coughed up the whole event – the aliens, who so carefully choreographed everything else, failed to anticipate or have a contingency plan for this.

Of course, the government agents tried to make him forget everything as well. Like the aliens, they failed too. So now Lovelace has shared everything in a tell-all book – even though a hybrid human-alien paid him a recent visit and warned him that if he blabbed too much – his own government might kill him.

What are we to make of it?

Paranoid conspiracy theorists will offer that all of Lovelace’s experiences were implanted in his head during the monstrous drug-infused hypnosis session he was subjected to several months after returning from Devil’s Den. They’ll say he may have never been visited by aliens at all – but the government wants him to believe that it did happen — and then tell all of us ordinary citizens in a book so that we might believe it too.

But why?

I bet Lovelace would contend that his X-ray sheets of weird implants in his leg are his ace in the hole. If none of this happened to him, then how do you explain the reality that he harbored strange objects in his leg? As a lawyer, Lovelace understands the value of hard physical evidence when making a case to a jury. But that’s no problem for the skeptics — they’ll just say he faked the X-rays,

As for me, I am going to say that Mr. Lovelace’s story is true — I can be skeptical, yes — but in this case, despite all, I believe Terry Lovelace.

This is not fiction. I don’t think he is trying to pull one over on us. I’ll say no more as to why I conclude this, but leave you with this reminder:

The world of ufology is our culture’s most confounding, bottomless rabbit hole – a labyrinth within a labyrinth — a mystery wrapped inside an enigma tied with a conundrum — a universe where the only certainty is uncertainty.
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NOTE: BELOW ARE JUST A FEW OF THE OTHER UFO BOOKS I REVIEW HERE ON TOP 10 BOOK REVIEWS:

MANAGING MAGIC By Grant Cameron

EXTRATERRESTRIAL ODYSSEY By Roger “Rocky” Kvande

HOW TO TALK TO AN ALIEN By Nancy DuTertre

ALIENS IN THE BACKYARD By Trish and Rob MacGregor

ALIENS IN THE FORREST by Noe Torres and Ruben Uriarte

SEARCHERS by Ron Felber

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Veteran UFO Investigator Grant Cameron Makes His Case: U.S. Government Has Been Managing A Subtle, Controlled Disclosure Strategy For 70 Years

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Review by: KEN KORCZAK

Who is the most important person in ufology today?

Forget Steven Greer or Tom Delong or Stanton Friedman or Linda Moulton Howe or Richard Dolan or Leslie Kean or Steve Basset or Timothy Good or Luis Elizondo or Robert and Ryan Wood or Michael Salla — or even the now mostly silent Jacques Vallee.

The most significant figure in the study of UFO phenomenon today is this guy: GRANT CAMERON.

Cameron, a well-mannered Canadian from the Great Plains city of Winnipeg, has been doggedly seeking the truth about UFOs for 42 years. He was unwittingly thrust into this role after a personal encounter with the famous Charlie Red Star in 1975.

That was the name given to a blood-red, pulsating ball of light that amazed people dwelling in a series of small towns in southern Manitoba near the North Dakota border.

The Charlie Red Star UFO was captured in many photos as it cruised the countryside of southern Manitoba from 1975 to 1976.

For an incredible two years, Charlie Red Star haunted the skies of this sparsely-populated, wide-open prairie landscape dotted by small farming communities. The conservative, no-nonsense folks of the region could only gape in wonder at the bold aerial antics of the unfathomable object gamboling across their heavens.

Grant Cameron – who previously had zero interest in UFOs – suddenly knew that he would spend the rest of his life trying to find an answer: “What was that thing?”

Now, more than four decades later, he feels he has an answer. He sums up his conclusion with a single word: “Consciousness.”

Grant Cameron

More than anything else, the central most important aspect of the UFO phenomenon is the idea that Consciousness is primary and material reality is secondary. If you want to understand UFOs, you must start there, Cameron says.

Furthermore, if you stay mired in materialism – specifically, the paradigm of material, nuts-n-bolts science – your fate in the UFO field will be an agonizing entanglement in one bizarre rabbit hole after another – it might even drive you insane.

Cameron has avoided insanity, however, or even evolving into an eccentric UFO weirdo. He’s maintained a kind of grounded dignity. He has diligently sought answers while living gracefully with uncertainty and staying close to facts.

But that doesn’t mean he has rejected high strangeness out of hand. Cameron has since embraced a lot of way-out-there stuff, from the accepting the reality of ETs interacting with us daily to the existence of trans-dimensional portals that can punch us through to parallel worlds. (NOTE: See Cameron’s video documentation of Xendra Portals HERE

This book, MANAGING MAGIC, sticks to slightly more practical matters, however. A few years ago, Cameron said he was done with investigating UFOs. He concluded that chasing lights in the sky and sifting through endless classified government reports obtained through FOIA requests was fruitless.

Recent release of a U.S. Air Force F/A-18 fighter jet footage of a UFO exploded speculation that the government was about to reveal more of what it knows about UFOs

But just like Michael Corleone’s famous lament from Godfather III – “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in” – Cameron felt compelled to write another UFO book. That’s because of what he believes he now knows about the issue of Disclosure – official government disclosure to the public about the reality of UFOs.

A huge portion of the UFO community has been foaming at the mouth for decades, excoriating the government for withholding information from tax-paying citizens who have a right to know . In fact, ranting and raving about oppressive and corrupt government secrecy is an almost inseparable issue from the central premise of UFOs itself within ufology circles.

Government secrecy fosters delicious conspiracy theories and a self-righteous “feel-good” outlet for venting and blaming the powerful elite for the condescending way they treat the masses. The evil cabals at the highest levels of society have earned our virtuous rage of the sainted public.

Let’s face it – playing the victim is a guilty pleasure for many people — perhaps even when justified.

Cameron now believes, however, that our government has likely adopted the correct course all along – that course is an extremely gradual disclosure designed to drip-drip-drip out UFO information over a period of decades.

Doing it that way is for our own good, Cameron says. That’s because the actual truth behind the phenomenon is so bizarre, so enormous, so weird and so epistemologically shattering – a long, drawn-out disclosure is the only responsible thing to do. In the conclusion of Managing Magic he writes:

“After decades of work on the disclosure problem I have become much more sympathetic to the position the government has taken, and how they have handled the situation they were handed in the 1940s.

“Many in the UFO community will say that full disclosure should be a simple thing and done ASAP. The more I view the evidence, the less I agree with that position and the more I see a potential for disaster were that approach to be taken.”

He also states near the beginning of the book:

“The American government is taking the lead on this measured disclosure. When the facts get reviewed, this becomes very evident.”

This view is anathema to so many in ufology. Again, the endorphin rush they get from the righteous indignation they feel at the hands of a deceitful government is a fundamental aspect – in an ironic sort of way – of why people get enthralled by the UFO issue in the first place.

Rock star turned UFO investigator Tom DeLong.

Dr. Steven Greer.

Cameron offers a blunt assessment on some of the biggest names in ufology today – especially rock-star-turned-ufology-star TOM DELONG, former front man for the band Blink 182. Another is DR. STEVEN GREER the emergency-room-doctor-turned-self-proclaimed-greatest-ufologist-of-all-time.

Cameron points out what these two men have in common: They are both supreme ego maniacs. As such, they have been easily manipulated by government disinformation agents who are only happy to use them to leak both factual UFO information to the public – and disinformation when it suits the government strategy of a nuanced, subtle and gradual disclosure process.

That’s the crux of what Cameron is trying to tell us here. Our government, in fact, IS disclosing UFO information to us – but it is also misleading us with smoke screens when it wants to. The government is threading a delicate middle path between disclosure and disinformation – this middle way is designed to gradually acclimate the public over a period of many years – a necessary strategy to avoid catastrophic consequences.

But be warned: This is complicated.

Cameron’s thesis toils under the burden of that complication. I advise the reader to consider the information in this book with great care. The potential to misunderstand what Cameron is telling us is considerable. There are occasions in which the author would appear to contradict his own theories – but I believe that’s an artifact of the tangled labyrinth we necessarily must stumble through. The truth about UFOs is the the proverbial, “riddle, wrapped in a mystery, hidden inside an enigma.”

With Managing Magic, Grant Cameron makes a heroic effort to light a pathway through the most vexing labyrinth ever to confront mankind.
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EXTRATERRESTRIAL ODYSSEY By Roger Kvande

SELECTED BY EXTRATERRESTRIALS By Bill Tompkin

PASSPORT TO THE COSMOS By John Mack M.D.

LIGHT QUEST By Andrew Collins

SEARCHERS By Ron Felber

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The Long UFO Journey of Greg Bishop “Defies Language”

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Review by: KEN KORCZAK

Greg Bishop is an aging UFO warrior who got sucked into the bizarre vortex of ufology when still a young boy – and now all these decades later he bears the psychic scars that only UFO investigation can inflict upon the eager seeker who just wants to know the truth – but where finding any truth may be impossible.

His efforts have been persistent and bordering on heroic. In this book Mr. Bishop takes us on a breezy sojourn through his thoughts and experiences gleaned from his persistent pursuit for understanding of the UFO phenomenon. In these pages, he often veers from one extreme to another – from the brutal realization that much about UFOs is depressing bunk, while at the same time, acknowledging there remains tantalizing evidence that something “nonhuman” has been interacting with mankind for thousands of years.

But just what is it? That’s the question that torments Greg Bishop. That’s what makes him the kind of UFO junkie I can appreciate. Bishop has learned to live gracefully with uncertainty. He knows that just when you think you’ve found some solid footing about who or what UFOs are, the game changes suddenly and quixotically. Fact becomes fallacy, truth becomes fraud – but just when you’re ready to chuck it all and give up, guess what?

Something happens to suggest that: “They’re he-e-e-r-e!” And so the devotee is off and running again on the universe’s most mercurial quest.

George Adamski: Perhaps the most famous of the ’50s Era Conactees

Howard Menger: Was this famous Contactee a fraud, a CIA asset, or the real deal?

His journey has sent Bishop reaching for answers and grappling to suggest new models. For example, he suggests that the 1950s contactee era, ala the likes of George Adamski, Howard Menger, et.al., might be viewed (or explained) as a kind of post-modern art movement – an attempt to inject radical new ideas into the collective consciousness of humanity leveraging the benign space visitor motif. Was this “art movement” a conscious creation of the various Adamskis and Mengers? Were they blatant bunko artists — or perhaps they were unwilling pawns of actual alien influences, meddling with the mind of humanity for a planetary social engineering project?

Who knows.

While Bishop conjures new paradigms, he also decries our penchant to latch on to pre-packaged explanations for what UFOs are, especially the long-dominant belief that, “They are alien beings from other planets visiting the Earth in nuts-and-bolts spacecraft.” He says a statement like this is “so loaded with semantic baggage … it is meaningless.” He writes:

“Belief implies a lack of critical thinking. UFOs are automatically assumed by most to be structures vehicles piloted by intelligent being from other planets. They don’t need to be … there are many reasons that a skeptical mindset and lack of assumptions make the subject more interesting and worthy of consideration. To settle on one explanation is to shut down serious inquiry …”

Greg Bishop

That goes for all the theories and models floated in the past 50 or 60 years – that UFOs are interdimensional beings/craft, time travelers, ancient ‘gods’ or exotic but indigenous races that co-evolved with humanity right here on earth, or that the UFO phenomenon is a manifestation of consciousness evolution of the psyche of mankind itself.

Maybe it’s all of the above – but ultimately – the brutal fact is that we still find ourselves mired in a radical state of: “We just don’t know.” That does not mean that we should stop clawing at our intellects to eke out some measure of understanding, Bishop suggests.

So this is a pretty good read – and that goes for both the extremely experienced UFO enthusiasts (guys like me who have read thousands of books and articles and done actual investigations) to the casual reader who likes to browse a UFO book occasionally to scratch a UFO itch.

Be aware that this is one of those books that has been cobbled together from a collection of the author’s blog posts and other published articles from over the years – these kinds of books tend to suffer a bit from lack of focus or a certain unevenness in the quality of what’s included and what probably should have been cut.

However, for the most part, IT DEFIES LANGUAGE challenges, entertains and invites us to stretch our minds. Greg Bishop urges us to think outside the box, shake off our preconceived notions, guard against getting rutted in outmoded models, avoid fallacies and traps – and beseech our Higher Power of choice for the wisdom to know the difference.

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Diary of a mad man: Aerospace engineer Bill Tompkins bizarre ramblings about aliens and UFOs damages respectable ufology

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Review by: KEN KORCZAK

This is a bizarre book that is so terrible, I can’t decide if it’s “so bad it’s funny” or “so bad it’s sad.” I opt for the second.

It’s sad because a travesty such as this publication can set back the legitimate study of the UFO phenomenon by decades. It’s a bonanza for hard-core, closed-minded skeptics, always eager to find the latest example of “UFO-Fringe-Nut” material to heap scorn upon.

What’s even worse is that this book is written by a bona fide aerospace industry insider – BILL TOMPKINS – a man who worked at the top his field in rocket science as a designer and engineer for decades. Tompkins worked on some of the most sensitive military defense and space program projects and had the highest security clearances. This makes him a man genuinely in a position to “know” and be a bomb-shell whistle blower.

The book’s editor, DR. ROBERT WOOD, has an equally impressive resume. He holds a Ph.D. in physics from Cornell University and was a top scientist for McDonald Douglas for 43 years.

But instead of delivering the ultimate UFO smoking gun, Dr. Wood and Tompkins give us this muddy mish mash of egregiously poorly written, edited and childishly sexist garbage that should never have seen the publishing light of day.

There are many claims that are clearly delusional and easy to prove as false – the most obvious of which is that Tompkins claims to have consulted personally with DR. JACQUES VALLEE, astronomer, computer scientist and arguable the world’s leading theorist on UFO phenomenon.

Dr. Jacques Vallee, right, with J. Allen Hynek

Tompkins says he meetings with Dr, Vallee took place in the early to mid-1950s – he said that Dr. Vallee:

“… divulged his knowledge concerning the Federation of Planets – a sort of galactic governing force that limited the extraterrestrials of rogue planets from threatening other planets. Basically, Jacques was … in contact with them …”

The only problem? In the early 1950s Jacques Vallee was a teenage boy growing up in France. He was still years away from becoming a Ph.D. scientist. Apologists for Tompkins say, “Okay, maybe he just confused the time frame a bit … he might have met with Dr. Vallee in the late 60s or 70s …”

But we know this is impossible as well since Dr. Jacques Valle himself has publicly stated that he has never met Bill Tompkins, and furthermore, Dr. Vallee calls the comments about him in Tompkins book “absurd,” “false,” and even “injurious.”

In addition to whoppers like this, the book is riddled with small factual errors, such as saying modern humans emerged 30,000 years ago, and in another passage, Tompkins says it was 300,000 years ago. Any idiot can spend two minutes on Google and find out both these dates are wrong and that the first known anatomically modern human is dated to 190,000 years ago.

I could fill another page with similar blunders, but let’s get to some of the other giant absurdities, such as the author’s monumentally, even painfully sexist, sleazy and raunchy accounts of sex-play with what he believed to be alien women.

He tells of how the American aerospace industry was infiltrated with dozens of sizzling hot human-looking female “Nordic” aliens who universally dressed and acted like hookers – and they were seemingly incapable of stopping themselves from “rubbing their bodies” against all those pencil-neck rocket engineers dressed in their short sleeve white shirts, ties, horn-rimmed glasses and pocket-protector pen holders.

Sexy “Nordic” alien women. Were numerous lurid pulp sci-fi covers like this one inspired by the real thing?

Again and again, insanely beautiful young women dressed in “micro-mini skirts,” wearing “translucent plastic 4-inch spiked heels” and “breasts falling out of their tops” come on to Mr. Tompkins and his pals, not only promising the hottest sex they have ever had, but taking the time to “red mark” and correct and update their advanced engineering specs in their spare time.

Tompkins believes these were ETs who were sent by “the good aliens, the “Nordics” – and that these wise beings used these lovely sluts to implant psychic images for advanced space vehicle designs directly into engineer’s heads — before taking them out on the town for wild drinking parties and unstoppable sex.

Yes! It’s all in this book!

The editor, our famous Dr. Wood, makes the claim that his pal Bill Tompkins was propositioned dozens of times by these alien-prostitute-geniuses, but “never once gave in” – and yet, Tompkins includes a special chapter in which an alien hottie takes him off planet in a space ship to a distant “Las Vegas-like planet” where she says that they will spend three months together having sex. She tells him:

“We will climax many times together and you will love every month of it.”

Of course, Tompkins then backs away from this bizarre tail – probably because he knows his wife and children are reading – and says his outer space sex romp may have been just a “mental image” implanted in his mind by the aliens. He just isn’t sure.

Skeptics will quickly dismiss this book as the delusional rambling of an old man afflicted with senile dementia – and then Dr. Robert Wood with his advanced age and 43 years in the aerospace industry must also be senile and delusional – and skeptics will say that these two senile, demented old men decided to get together and write a crazy book, for some reason.

But such skeptics are no better than these two nutty, sadly lecherous old coots.

So what are we to make of this? While skeptics will gleefully heap scorn, certain conspiracy theorists will scream “mind control!” They’ll say top secret government mind-warping techniques implanted the brains of Tompkins and Dr. Wood with fantastic delusions they now believe to be real – all this to seed chaos, throw up smoke screens, to keep the general public pacified, and keep everyone guessing about what “black-ops” and “shadow governments” are really up to.

As for the rest of us – well, why worry about it? This book can be summarily dismissed as a “non-contribution” to ufology. It’s a worthless document, and meaningless.
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BLACK SWAN GHOSTS by Simeon Hein PhD

SYMBIOSIS by Nancy Tremaine

PASCAGOULA: THE CLOSEST ENCOUNTER by Calvin Parker

INCIDENT AT DEVIL’S DEN by Terry Lovelace

MANAGING MAGIC by Grant Cameron

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