Manly P. Hall and the Winter Solstice (Reprise)

Here's a rare opportunity to sit in the front row of the lecture hall at The Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles while Manly P. Hall, the twentieth century's foremost expert in the occult (and author of such comprehensive masterpieces as THE SECRET TEACHINGS OF ALL AGES and THE SECRET DESTINY OF AMERICA), delivers an illuminating lecture about the esoteric symbolism of the Winter Solstice. 

Click HERE to listen to Part One.

Click HERE to listen to Part Two. 

GUFFEY IN THE WILD!

Guffey books have been seen in the wild! Yes, indeed, signed first editions of my books are currently available at Sunken City Books, a charming used bookstore located in downtown San Pedro. Visit Sunken City Books at 403 W. 6th St., San Pedro, CA 90731! Click HERE to visit their Instagram page.

Jack the Ripper: The Not Quite Final Solution

Yet another new Jack the Ripper theory has recently cropped up. This theory is a slight variation on Stephen Knight's 1976 book, JACK THE RIPPER: THE FINAL SOLUTION, which inspired Bob Clark's 1979 film MURDER BY DECREE, Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell's graphic novel FROM HELL, Martin Short's 1989 follow-up book INSIDE THE BROTHERHOOD, and the Hughes Brothers' 2001 FROM HELL film adaptation. Only the suspect has been changed, from Sir William Gull to Aaron Kosminski. 

Here's an excerpt from Fred Kelly's 10-6-24 DAILY MAIL article entitled "Jack The Ripper: The Astonishing Freemason Connection that Explains His Motive and a 136-year Cover-up - As His Real Face Is Unmasked for the First Time":

[P]erhaps the most terrifying aspect of this quintuple homicide, committed over less than four months, is that for over a century, the killer's identity was a mystery. Instead, he simply became known as Jack the Ripper.

And then, ten years ago in 2014, the Mail exclusively revealed how amateur sleuth ­Russell Edwards had identified one Aaron Kosminski, a Jewish immigrant from Poland, as the fabled killer.

The evidence was as overwhelming as it was stomach-churning.

A decade on and the Mail can now reveal further astonishing evidence as to how ­Kosminski's hitherto-unknown ties to the highly secretive Freemasons motivated his sadistic killings – and how his Masonic ­connections shielded him from law enforcement, despite widespread conviction within the police that Kosminski was indeed the ­murderous Ripper [...].

In 2007, ­Russell Edwards – a ­businessman from North London and Ripper enthusiast – stumbled across a shawl at an auction in Bury St Edmunds alleging to have been found on Catherine ­Eddowes's corpse [...].

Edwards set to work examining the shawl for DNA alongside a crack team of forensic scientists. It wasn't long before Edwards had a positive match between the DNA in the blood stains and a direct descendant of the murdered ­Catherine Eddowes. In other words, the shawl was genuine.

Incredibly, Edwards's team was also able to identify the DNA found in the semen as Aaron ­Kosminski's. They did so by ingeniously ­matching it to the DNA of one of Aaron's sister's descendants, known only as 'M,' after requests to exhume Kosminski's body were rebuffed [...].

In February 2023 a series of photographs landed in Edwards' inbox. One in particular caught his eye. It looked like a class photo, 15 men – all dressed ­identically in suits with a flowing overgarment and remarkable handlebar ­moustaches – staring straight at the camera. These were all ­members of the Lodge of Israel, an order of Freemasonry set up for Jewish immigrants in Britain.

And among the group of men was none other than Kosminski's eldest brother, Isaac, a wealthy tailor who moved to London in April 1870 before changing his name to Abrahams [...].

But the role of the Freemasons doesn't stop there. Edwards acknowledges in his new book that there 'has always been a nod, or reference to a cover-up by the masons' to protect Kosminski.

However, his discovery of the photographs confirms it.

I laughed out loud when I read the above lines: "But the role of the Freemasons doesn't stop there. Edwards acknowledges in his new book that there 'has always been a nod, or reference to a cover-up by the masons' to protect Kosminski. However, his discovery of the photographs confirms it." How does said photograph "confirm" Edwards' theories regarding the identity of Jack the Ripper? It doesn't "confirm" anything. Furthermore, the DNA evidence to which the article refers is hardly definitive. Assuming the scarf was indeed owned by Catherine Eddowes, how could one know for sure that the DNA was left behind by Jack the Ripper? After all, the DNA could have come from one of Catherine's customers earlier in the evening (i.e., Kosminski). The fact that Kosminski had a sexual encounter with Eddowes doesn't prove he's the man who murdered her. 

Having said that, I've been fascinated by the Jack the Ripper case since I was a teenager, so a new theory at this late date--accompanied by some modicum of scientific evidence--is certainly intriguing. But if this current theory doesn't quite satiate your Ripper fix, you might want to spend your time listening to the late Colin Wilson delivering an hour-plus lecture at the first Jack the Ripper Conference, which occurred in April of 1996. This lecture was aired on an episode of the RIPPERCAST: THE WHITECHAPEL MURDERS PODCAST back in 2018:

"We are very pleased to bring to you author Colin Wilson's talk at the first ever Jack the Ripper Conference, held in Ipswich 12-14 April, 1996. This 22 year old audience recording was rescued from a second hand bookshop by Mark Ripper and we are grateful to Mark for saving this piece of Ripperology history so that we may share it with you.

"Originally recorded on a 120 minute long cassette tape and sometime later transferred to CD, this recording is beginning to show its age, but its historical value outweighs the deteriorating quality of the audio."

By the way, one of my favorite pieces of fiction inspired by Jack the Ripper has always been Harlan Ellison's "The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World," which you can find in Ellison's breakthrough DANGEROUS VISIONS anthology (republished by Blackstone earlier this year). Another highly recommended Ripper book is Robert Bloch's excellent 1980s suspense novel, THE NIGHT OF THE RIPPER (republished this very month courtesy of Valancourt Books).

WHERE DID THE ROAD GO?: Drones, Drones Everywhere!

Recommended Listening: In the latest episode of WHERE DID THE ROAD GO?, Seriah Azkath, Saxon (AKA Super Inframan), and Red Pill Junkie discuss the ongoing drone mystery...

WHERE DID THE ROAD GO? RADIO:

Drones, Drones Everywhere! (Dec 14, 2024):

Drones Across Your Face!

Regarding the mysterious wave of large, car-sized drones invading the skies of the United States, a friend, collaborator, and CHAMELEO reader from Canada sent me a message last night that read (in part), "Hope all is good for you and you're not being droned out. Could they be what you describe in CHAMELEO?"

I was pleased to see that someone other than myself had noticed the eerie parallels between current events and the surveillance-run-amok technology I describe in the pages of my 2015 nonfiction book, CHAMELEO. I had been thinking about those parallels myself quite a bit during the past few days. Back in 2004, my friend Damien (named Dion Fuller in the book) insisted that flying-saucer-like drones had followed him out of San Diego, into Texas, and all around the country. Almost everyone I knew at the time concluded Damien was suffering from delusions. Now, at the tail end of 2024, everybody in America (including the population of San Diego, where Damien was living when the chaos described in CHAMELEO began to unfold) is seeing the same so-called "delusions" that were dogging Damien's heels twenty years ago. 

Back in 2004, it was just Damien getting mindfucked (as far as I knew at the time). Now, in 2024, everybody's getting mindfucked! I can't wait to see what 2025 will bring. Be prepared for a vertiginous plunge into what my late friend Walter Bowart (author of the 1978 book, OPERATION MIND CONTROL) once referred to as "The Disassociated States of America." 

What follow are two excerpts from CHAMELEO, the first from Chapter 11 and the second from the epilogue...

EXCERPT #1:

He left the city limits of San Diego with five cars on his trail. I wondered if they would even let him leave. But they did. And as he sped farther and farther away from San Diego, those particular five cars turned around and drove away.

From that point on he would call me from his cell phone every other day to give me updates on his progress. He said he was pretty sure that no vehicles had followed him since those initial five. However, he insisted he kept seeing some kind of circular device in the sky that appeared to be trailing him.

“What do you mean?” I said. “Like a flying saucer?”

He said it was kind of like a disc—but relatively small. If not for the sunlight glinting off its metal surface, he never would have noticed it. Sometimes it was there, sometimes it wasn’t.

In the early 1980s the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego developed vertical-take-off-and-landing air vehicles known as Airborne Remotely Operated Devices (AROD). In the 1990s these vehicles evolved into robots called Multipurpose Security and Surveillance Mission Platforms. According to the corporation’s own website, such robots were “designed to provide a rapidly deployable, extended-range surveillancecapability for a variety of operations and missions” including “tactical security” as well as “support to counterdrug and border patrol operations” (http:www.spawar.navy.mil/robots/air/amgss/mssmp.html). Since residents of California are well aware of the fact that the border patrol can’t seem to keep people from slipping over the border into San Diego, perhaps the real purpose of the MSSMPs is to keep certain people in.

Note: The San Diego headquarters of the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command is located only six miles from Dion’s Pacific Beach apartment, a mere ten minute drive.

EXCERPT #2:

In 2011, due to various reasons (mainly economic), Dion moved to a house located in the Redwoods in Northern California. His mother lives in the middle of the forest next to a remote area appropriately named “the Lost Coast.” Within weeks of moving into the Redwoods the harassment began again—with renewed intensity.      

The High Strangeness kicked off when Dion began seeing classic, 1950s-style UFOs hovering over his mother’s property, usually very late at night. He’d never before seen anything like these lights. They disobeyed all known laws of physics. After several weeks of documenting these sightings with his camera, he spotted a military-style drone flying low overhead in the night skies, well below the cloud cover. He watched in amazement as the drone seemed to release several lights that looked precisely like the UFOs he’d seen so often before.

It’s important to note that this area of Humboldt County is filled with marijuana farmers who are protective of their crops, suspicious of outsiders, and trigger-happy to boot. As these drones began appearing in waves over the Mattole Valley, the local rednecks whipped out their rifles and began firing at the ominous craft. A rumor spread through the area that the farms would soon be raided by the FBI, or the ATF, or the DEA, or some similar government agency. One day a local resident spotted two “agents” (if, indeed, that’s what they were) camped out on a nearby hillside; the “agents” appeared to be spying on the farmlands below with a pair of binoculars. (The sunlight glinting off the binoculars gave them away.) En masse, the local farmers ran up into the hills with their firearms, intent on blowing the intruders into jagged, bloody shards. The “agents,” or whoever they were, beat their feet and scurried away like panicked vermin. 

Later that night the drone sightings in the valley grew even more intense. They were now so frequent that even Dion’s mother (who had always been skeptical of Dion’s San Diego experiences) admitted she couldn’t explain their presence in the skies above her modest little home…

END OF EXCERPTS

SPECIAL BONUS: In July of 2012, Damien took this photo of a flying-saucer-like drone that streaked off into the skies above Humboldt County. A black-and-white version of this photo appears in CHAMELEO, but this is the first time it's being seen in color...