War of the Worlds

In memory of the thousands of brave Americans who lost their lives in Grover's Mill, New Jersey during the first salvo of the Great Martian War, let's now travel back in time to that fateful October evening exactly 75 years ago....

To hear Orson Welles' harrowing documentary about the savage extraterrestrial menace that devastated the globe in 1938, simply click HERE. 

But be forewarned, ladies and gentlemen!  This broadcast is not for the faint of heart.  After all, one might call this the first example of "snuff" disseminated over the public airwaves.  We here at cryptoscatology.com, however, are determined to provide this rare archive to you as a public service... lest we forget....

The Stately Ghosts of England

Another entry in our special cryptoscatological Halloween roundup….

"Ghosts inhabit four out of five of England's historic houses."

I bet you didn't know that.  And neither did I until I saw The Stately Ghosts of England, an obscure and fascinating--on various levels at once--television documentary from 1965 featuring actress Margaret Rutherford (most famous for her portrayal of Agatha Christie's venerable detective, Miss Marple) and "society clairvoyant" (yes, I know, it's good work if you can get it) Tom Corbett as they tool about the British countryside in a vintage convertible in search of "the stately ghosts of England" ...all of it "brought to you in LIVING COLOR on NBC!"  The entire documentary can be seen on YouTube in five parts, all of which are highly recommended by several prominent ectoplasmic beings in this dimension and elsewhere.  Part One can be seen by clicking HERE.

It's worth noting that The Stately Ghosts of England was produced, written and directed by Frank DeFelita, who would later write the supernatural novel The Entity as well as the screenplay adaptation that eventually became Sidney J. Furie's 1982 film The Entity starring Barbara Hershey.  According to DeFelita, his novel was based on the real life haunting of a California woman named Doris Bither who lived in a small bungalow in Culver City, California during the most harrowing of her poltergeist experiences.  The actual incidents that gave birth to The Entity can be read about in detail by clicking HERE, which will guide you to the personal website of veteran paranormal investigator, Dr. Barry Taft, author of the book Aliens Above, Ghosts Below (and, as you may recall, the subject of our previous Halloween entry).

An Unknown Encounter

Yet another entry in our special cryptoscatological Halloween roundup for 2013….

Submitted for your approval:  an intriguing documentary about the paranormal entitled An Unknown Encounter which draws heavily upon the research of Dr. Barry Taft, an experienced parapsychologist who worked at UCLA's Parapsychology Laboratory from 1969 to 1978.  This documentary, produced and directed by Barry Conrad, purports to be a true account of a 6-year-long investigation of a malevolent haunting centered on a house located near the shipping ports of San Pedro, California.  It's well worth watching in its entirety.  You can see the full-length film HERE.

LOU REED R.I.P. (1942-2013)

Here’s my one and only Lou Reed story: I met Lou Reed in the Spring of 2005 at UCLA’s annual Festival of Books. Only the day before, I’d heard—almost by accident—that Reed was scheduled to perform a dramatic reading based on The Raven followed by questions-and-answers and a book signing. I told my friend Sharon about the event and asked her if she wanted to accompany me. Since Sharon is habitually late—to the extent that it seems to border on being a serious medical condition—I took the precaution of telling her the event was at noon even though it was actually beginning at one o’clock… and yet somehow we still managed to arrive twenty minutes late.

Nonetheless, we saw the entire Q&A, which was quite illuminating. I recall being impressed by the fact that Reed’s knowledge of Edgar Allan Poe didn’t seem to be at all superficial, which of course is exactly what you’d expect from almost any other popular musician who had taken upon himself the daunting task of distilling the essence of Poe into a series of rock 'n' roll songs. At one point he even commented on Poe having presaged the Big Bang Theory in Eureka, the pre-Fortean book of which only the most ardent Poe scholar is even aware. Reed seemed to have actually read the damn thing from cover to cover. (I’m not even sure Poe’s biographers have done that.) At one point, in answer to a question about his attitudes toward the Bush administration’s apparent obsession with redneck-style End Times theology, I recall Reed claiming he’d been thinking about that exact same issue during the plane ride from New York to Los Angeles and as a result had written a brand new country-western song called “Jesus Was a Jew.”

After the Q&A everyone in the audience lined up to meet the great man himself. The line wrapped around the building—needless to say, an anomaly at the UCLA Festival of Books. As Sharon and I approached Reed, I found myself growing inexplicably nervous. I was nowhere near that apprehensive while sharing an elevator ride with all four of The Ramones in San Diego in 1990, and yet here I was getting a tad jittery. I had planned to ask Reed a question about Little Jimmy Scott, but by the time I reached the table I looked into his weird-ass bulging eyeballs trapped behind those wraparound shades and drew a complete blank. It was one of the few times in my life when I found myself absolutely tongue-tied. My original question evacuated my brain, and instead I heard myself uttering a complete non sequitur: “Are you… aware… of the work of Neil Gaiman?” I have absolutely no idea why I said this. Perhaps because Gaiman quotes Reed so much in his own work? I really don’t know to this day. Unfathomable. Just plain dumb. Anyway, there the question was, floating in the air the two of us now shared, utterly irretrievable.  

Reed just stared at me with those monstrous, compound eyes—they seemed as if they were trying to escape Reed’s skull and leap through his sunglasses—for quite a long time (or at least what seemed like a long time to me) before finally responding with a snarl and a distinct hint of disgust in his voice: “You mean that comic book guy?” He said nothing more about the subject. He signed my copy of Between Thought and Expression, slid it toward me across the wooden table, and that was it. 

I once told this story to Jack Womack (author of Random Acts of Senseless Violence and many other brilliant books), who immediately responded: “Lou Reed is a weasel, and anecdotes like that are why I’ll always love him.” Amen. 

By the way, I once saw Lou Reed in concert. This was in 1988 during the New York tour. The memory of Reed and Mike Rathke engaged in a virtuoso two-way guitar duel that seemed to last for a quarter of an hour during the middle of “The Original Wrapper” will forever be emblazoned in my brain. Blessed Be, Lou—to both you and your over-engorged, diseased liver, you son of a bitch.

Let’s fade out on “HALLOWEEN PARADE,” shall we?

Oh, one last note: According to Victor Bockris’ 1995 biography, Transformer, Lou Reed’s favorite comic book story of all time was “Foul Play” by Al Feldstein and Jack Davis from the infamous 1950s EC horror comic book, The Haunt of Fear. So, in honor of both Lou Reed and Halloween, here it is—an encore performance of “Foul Play” by that transgressive punk rock duo known as Feldtein & Davis….

Click HERE to read “Foul Play.”  

Click HERE to listen to “Halloween Parade.”  

 

Support Your Nazi-style Orwellian Police State

The first in a series of special Halloween Cryptoscatological treats....

What follows is far, far spookier than any Halloween scare you could possibly imagine.  Thrill to the sights and sounds of blissfully unaware Amurrricans signing a petition to support a "Nazi-style Orwellian Police State."  For those of you who have already read my "Strange Tales of Homeland Security" article in Fortean Times #305, the fact that the following sociological experiment occurred in San Diego is particularly appropriate.  Click HERE for your scary little treat.

Masonic "Rant"

All the major news outlets are reporting on Diane Reidy's "rant" about the U.S. Constitution and Freemasonry that took place on the floor of the House of Representatives last night (8-16-13).  As usual, the reportage at Infowars.com tends to be the most pithy, so I'm linking to Paul Joseph Watson's 10-17-13 article entitled "Bizarre 'Freemason' Rant on House Floor During Debt Ceiling Vote."  Here's an excerpt:

"A stenographer staged a bizarre performance on the House floor near the end of the debt ceiling vote last night, ranting about Freemasons before she was quickly dragged away by security guards.

"Moments before House members passed a bill to raise the debt ceiling, a woman later identified as stenographer Diane Reidy approached the microphone at the Speaker’s Lobby in a trance-like state and began to shout.

"'He will not be mocked, don’t touch me, he will not be mocked,' Reidy ranted, adding, 'The greatest deception here is this is not one nation under God, it never was.'

"Officials began to remove Reidy as she screamed, 'It never was, had it been, it would not have been... the Constitution would not have been written by Freemasons, they go against God, you cannot serve two masters.'"

According to ABC News, Reidy was "interviewed by officers before being transported to a hospital 'for evaluation.'"

To read the Infowars coverage, click HERE.

To read the ABC News coverage, click HERE.

My Appearance on Tessa B. Dick's Radio Show

Yesterday Tessa B. Dick, wife of the late Philip K. Dick and author of the memoirs Philip K. Dick:  Remembering Firebright and Tessa B. Dick:  My Life on the Edge of Reality, interviewed me for about one hour on her radio show, Ancient of Days.  You can listen to the entire interview by clicking HERE.  I enter the show at approximately 33:00. 

The Intelligence Codes in A Clockwork Orange

Philip K. Dick claimed, on several different occasions, that in 1972 he was approached by representatives of an unnamed intelligence agency who demanded he embed certain codes into his next novel (which would have been Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, published by Doubleday in 1974).  Dick refused to cooperate.  Science fiction writers and fans have scoffed at this claim for decades, blaming Dick's drug use on this supposed paranoid hallucination... despite the fact that it can be demonstrated easily that professional science fiction writers like Cordwainer Smith and Curt Siodmak, both of whom had definite connections to various American espionage agencies, embedded sensitive intelligence information in their published work.

Apparently the same demands were made of Anthony Burgess in England.  Unlike Dick, however, Burgess didn't refuse the Faustian bargain... and apparently lived to regret it. 

Here's an excerpt from a Dangerous Minds article entitled "Anthony Burgess and the Top Secret Code in A Clockwork Orange" (originally posted on 8-21-13):

"Burgess’s best known novel is A Clockwork Orange, which became an international success once it had been filmed by Stanley Kubrick. Burgess came to hate it and told Playboy in 1971, of all his books it was the one he liked least. But without A Clockwork Orange would anyone have taken an interest in Burgess?

"This question becomes more interesting when considered in light of information revealed in Roger Lewis’s controversial biography of the novelist [...]. Around the 280-page mark, Lewis details his meeting with a British secret service man who informed the Welshman that Burgess was not wholly responsible for A Clockwork Orange. Rather it was a work of collaboration with the British secret services.

"Lewis was told by his source that A Clockwork Orange was about:

'....the mind-control experimentation conducted by Dr. Ewen Cameron at the Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal, between 1957 and 1963, and the Remote Neural Monitoring facility that operated out of Fort George Meade. The CIA were funding controversial research programmes into electronic brain stimulation. They induced exhaustion and nightmares in patients; they put hoods or cones over people’s heads to broadcast voices directly into their brains; they irradiated the auditory cortex or inner ear. When patients had their own speech played back to them, incessantly, they went insane. There was a misuse of civilians in these covert operations, and intelligence on these devices remains classified.'

"Indeed there is an hilarious appendix containing Lewis’s correspondence with the CIA, who neither confirm nor deny the existence or non-existence on files pertaining to Burgess’s secret service work.
According to Lewis, Burgess 'had been a low-grade collector of intelligence data (or ground observer) in the Far East' for the British. On return to England, he found himself in a world of spy scandals (Burgess, Philby and Maclean) and double agents (George Blake), where the American cousins were questioning their bond with the Brits. A plan was hatched where Burgess would essentially front a novel that would:

'...lift the corner of the carpet and put into his novel classified material about the (then) new-fangled conditioning experiments and aversion therapies being devised to reform criminals—experiments which had wider implications for the concept of social engineering.'

"According to Lewis’s 'Curzon Street contact':

'...Burgess’s collaborator was a former CIA officer called Howard Roman, a languages expert whose particular field had been the Polish Intelligence Service, the Urzad Bezpieczenstwa (UB)—and it was a senior officer in Polish military intelligence, Michal Goleniewski, who upon defecting had told the CIA about the mole at Underwater Weapons Establishment Portland.'

"The US connection explains why A Clockwork Orange is not littered with Russian references (as Burgess always claimed), but Americanisms like 'liquor store,' 'sidewalk,' 'pretzel,' and 'candy.'"

To read the entire article, click HERE.