From Combat Diary 27 There have recently been many web attacks on UFO believers and “New Age” folk, mostly by scientists and sceptics. Why are scientists so afraid and so censorious of all contemporary heightened experience? Science did not emerge new-born as a clean deal devoid of metaphysics and owes its very life to mystical …
A Fortean Analysis of Consumerism, Cargo-cult Belief, and Ufology for Jack Sarfatti Published in UFO Magazine, Vol. 23, No.3, April 2008 “We are not realists. We are not idealists. We are intermediatists that nothing is real, but that nothing is unreal: that all phenomena are approximations one way or the other between realness and unrealness. …
for Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniac who helped create the modern imagination Published in UFO Magazine, Volume 24, No. 5, June 2012 Descartes versus Chocolate-Fudge Bananas Almost all human beings now spend their entire waking lives talking to robots and watching silver screens. In this world, composed almost entirely of simulations, there is detectable a …
Published in UFO Magazine, Vol. 21 No. 10. December 2006 The Cultural Battlefield There are two kinds of skepticism: local and cultural. The first is wholly healthy. It shields us from the statements of politicians as it protects us from the claims of second-hand car salesmen and the bovine simplicities of television. Chronic cultural skepticism, …
Skepticism as Mystique: A Fortean Essay in Rationalist Panics and Skeptical Dementia Read More »
Published in Fortean Times No 75, June 1994 Editor’s Introduction: When science starts selling itself, ever more extravagant claims are made based on the flimsiest of evidence. Colin Bennett isn’t buying it. First, catch your well-turned-out, white male American scientist. Make sure he is in apple-pie order and give this worthy son a grant for …
First published in Fortean Times, October 2000 First sit in your room and claim to be the maker of a known corn circle, although you have done nothing of the kind. The ideal concealment is non-involvement. Now stand well back and prepare to duck. Rationalists and scientists will comment, but don’t worry. As usual they …
A Fortean Essay in Story Technologyfor Jacques Vallee Bennett should be hung. Bruce Maccabee The above image is a three-d recreation created by Kaptive 3D Animation Studios “Yes, both SERPO and the CHAD game are ‘phony’, but to leave it at that is to misunderstand the game that is being played. As the Alchemist said to …
First published in UFO Magazine August 2006 Everybody Laughs at Xera A twenty-something called David distributes a pamphlet entitled Visions Now to the seething Saturday crowds in Portobello Road. David, with his long green hair and a bamboo nose-flute around his neck, leads a dog on a string. His purple robe is embroidered with every …
Printed as an Appendix in Flying Saucers over the White House, Cosimo Books, 2010 Let us do something that we are not much encouraged to do these days. Let us try and rediscover the power of one of the great banned faculties of the twentieth century: the Imagination. Imagine a B-29 bomber crashed long ago …
Published in Politics of the Imagination, Headpress Books 2002 According to the book Assassinations, [1] there was so much packed into a typical Oswald week, an innocent observing alien could be excused for thinking that any one week was the first week of all creation. Oswald proceeds, with his cartoon mind, rather like Leopold Bloom, …