BUILDING A FORTEAN LIBRARY
Magonia magazine
It wasn’t just the Beatles, you know. On Merseyside in the 1960s another group of irreverent young men coalesced around an iconoclastic idea, and with rather more intellectual heft than the admittedly slightly better-known, and better-earning, moptops. (They also retained their sense of humour for longer than the fabled quartet.) We speak of Magonia magazine, which in one form or another ran for more than 40 years until 2009 (its exact date of birth “depends whether you date its origins with the Merseyside UFO Group Newsletter which started in 1965; with John Harney taking over its editorship and change to Bulletin in 1966; or with the founding of the original Merseyside UFO Bulletin in January 1968,” noted Peter Rogerson in a retrospective in Magonia 99, the final print issue). Having started as a UFO sheet, its remit had expanded by the late 1970s to cover related folklore and social phenomena, and so Magonia proper, as it were, was born, with John Rimmer, who’d joined after the first couple of issues of MUFOB, taking over the editorial reins. It and its predecessors are all pretty much complete online, and you can start hunting through the history at magoniamagazine.blogspot.com. There’s hardly anything there that’s not worth reading, unless you’re fatally allergic to the psychosocial hypothesis (PSH), and the spirit of the print edition lives on in the book reviews that continue to appear there.
If you are deeply allergic to the PSH, you could always start your trawl through the archives with Issue 72, which sported a massive article by one Anthony R Brown titled “The Decline and Fall of the Psychosocial Hypothesis”. “A Denunciation” might be a better description, as Mr Brown lays into every aspect of the PSH he can think of – including some that you hadn’t imagined, such as that “Hysteria represents the foundation stone upon which the whole Psychosocial model is built.” Having started with a concept that by the end of the 20th century had largely been discarded by psychologists except as a handy label for some syndromes (e.g. ‘hysterical blindness’) he ends thus: “The essence of the Psychosocial Hypothesis is of cheapening the witness’s puzzling experience, and questioning their basic honesty as a human being. The hypothesis and some of its supporters tells us more about their own character and their ignorance of even the most basic facts of science than it ever tells us of the true nature of the UFO or abduction. Time: that arbiter between truth, ignorance or mere interpretational propaganda, will reveal who, in the UFO world, will be remembered for their contributions to our subject.” How “the most basic facts of science” justify Mr Brown’s fondness for the ETH and UFO abductions is never made clear, although he does make it apparent that he doesn’t really understand the PSH, and in two ways.
In the first place, as we’ve said elsewhere, it’s not a single overarching hypothesis – unlike, say, the ‘rare Earth’ proposal, which more or less wipes out the notion of alien visitation (there being no aliens to visit). The PSH is an approach to reported anomalies, whose first task generally is to establish if there’s a possible – even better, a plausible – explanation for a UFO encounter, poltergeist infestation, leprechaun visitation, or whatever. Failing that, and mostly on a case-by-case basis, it’s as well to look round the corners of the individual claim and assess its context. This may mean picking apart claims of abduction by way of deconstructing the problems presented by hypnosis, or learning (revealing) more about the individual witness, or seeing how a particular story fits into a long-established narrative tradition, among other things. Behind this lurks the great shape of Occam’s Razor.
Mr Brown’s second failure is to think that the UFO problem, such as it is, has solely to do with science, and that Magonians presented themselves as taking a ‘scientific’ approach to it. They didn’t: they had other fish to fry and other rows to hoe, as the whole content of the magazine shows. As does the remarkable range of contributors. If there was a common theme, its hallmark was the application of logic rather than ‘science’. Not all agreed on where that logic led, which made for some fascinating – and sometimes amazingly long – exchanges. But none, so far as we know, ever suggested that weirdness per se might not be manifesting in the world. Yet it is surely intriguing that so many people in the world at large seem to want things to be weirder than they are, and on occasion to work quite hard to make them so. Which all by itself invites psychosocial commentary of some kind.
Now for the cherry-picking. With 40-plus years of material to survey, all of which as we’ve said is worth reading, some gems are bound to be overlooked, and everyone will have an opinion as to which they are. But, deep breath, these are the ones that have struck us as outstanding.
The pieces of which the Magonia editors are probably most proud are those, often written by the late Roger Sandell, deconstructing claims of ritual satanic abuse (RSA). The first batch of these, by Roger, Peter Rogerson and Michael Goss, appeared in Magonia 38 in Janury 1991 – pipping Fortean Times’s own thoroughgoing demolition ( FT57:46-62) by a couple of months. Roger Sandell returned to the subject several times before his untimely death in 1996. These first articles present
social commentary – Peter Rogerson might have written this yesterday: “If people say it happened to them you’ve got to believe or you are a heartless monster who is prolonging their pain. How can you be blind and deaf to this distress and agony? Thus was Rebecca Nurse, an innocent woman of Salem, condemned. After the jury, using their last gasp of common sense, had acquitted her, the accusers went into another fit: How can you be blind and deaf to the pain? So they changed their verdict and hanged her” – while folklorist Mike Goss traces the child-abduction-and-abuse motif back to pre-Christian Rome, and observes: “We can see well enough what the bogeyman was for. We are so concerned for our children’s welfare – we are so terrified that they will be abducted and abused by aliens – that we project into their consciousness certain images of abductor-abusers which we find particularly terrifying. For many modern adults Satanists probably pose a more credible and invidious threat than those old-time Jews, fairies, gypsies…” And: “I believe we can say that the material reveals a general or thematic pattern. Two symbols of innocence, vulnerability, and of our future are being threatened with blight and oblivion. They are being stolen from us: metaphorically as where the kidnap is replaced by corruption and subversion, which essentially alienates the victim from the rest of us; but also literally – the kidnap rumour per se... The Enemy is always a selfcontained alien group (which may, however, possess so loose an identity that we can only label it as ‘strangers’ or ‘perverts’). The Enemy strikes at us through our children... It is not merely that all we hallow in our culture is being corrupted and taken away. Without the bearers of children to continue that culture, without the children themselves, there will be no culture. This is what we are encouraged to protect by these stories.” Roger Sandell gives us a wonderfully concise history of modern Satanism, revealing along the way how phoney it’s all been, comparing it with the latter-day, utterly fantastical claims of RSA proponents: “...the idea of ritual abuse... involves mass ceremonies with elaborate rituals at which babies and other children are habitually sacrificed. This is apparently present to a degree that permeates all society. According to Gordon Thomas... there are 100,000 Satanists in Britain who include senior police officers and Salvation Army members. At American seminars claims have been made that 50,000 human sacrifices take place every year in the USA – twice the FBI figures for murders of all types.” Under Sandell’s steely gaze, RSA goes all the way downhill from there. In passing he notes the parallels with firstperson accounts from the outer fringes of abduction lore. The piece is aptly titled “From Evidence of Abuse to Abuse of Evidence”.
Abduction lore was never calculated to excite Magonia writers (one of the funniest items published was John Harney’s take on the Linda Napolitano/Brooklyn Bridge saga as related by Budd Hopkins), at least on the literal level. A couple of seminal items can’t go unnoticed: Martin Kottmeyer’s piece “Entirely Unpredisposed” took a rather rash phrase of Thomas ‘Ed’ Bullard, suggesting that Betty and Barney Hill were blank slates about aliens and abduction before being trailed and nabbed in 1961, and whistled it straight to the cleaners. As he put it: “If the UFO phenomenon is an artifact of culture, one would reasonably expect that cultural antecedents could be recognised for the major features it presents. Extraterrestrials, however, should be independent of culture and if they are newly arrived their characteristics should represent a discontinuity with the past.” This latter, he demonstrates, is a dog that don’t hunt. Peter Rogerson, who either never slept or had no social life, produced a massively detailed three-part pre-history of abductions, “Fairyland’s Hunters”, which showed from another angle that the Hills had plenty of forerunners in the spacenapping stakes, even if they were unaware of them. The point being that the Hills’ experience was not as seminal as it’s usually taken to be. It would be fatuous to try to summarise this huge piece of work: we just urge you to look it up and read it through.
Kottmeyer – who wrote stacks of other fine pieces and series for the magazine – unearthed the curious fact that the ‘wraparound’ eyes archetypical of alien ‘grays’ first surfaced in an episode of TV series The Outer Limits titled ‘The Bellero Shield’ (see FT322:46-48). This aired about 10 days before Barney Hill was hypnotised – and hadn’t appeared in what we know of his accounts previously. (It was also under hypnosis that Betty’s initial description of the aliens’ noses as “Jimmy Durante schnozzles” sanforized themselves down to little stubby things.) It is only fair to say that Betty denied in several interviews that she and Barney ever watched such shows on television, although direct viewing is hardly the only way Barney could have heard about the Bellero alien’s appearance. It’s also true that Jason Colavito has produced sundry other instances of TV shows that may have influenced Barney’s account. Perhaps no less to the point though is that while Kottmeyer produced a fairly comprehensive demolition of the ‘entirely unpredisposed’ proposition, it’s been the wraparound eyes that have generated the most ire and excitement. Magonia was never intended not to question and disturb received opinion, and had a kind of genius for finding, or being found by, writers of a certain iconoclastic disposition.
There’s just space to mention David Simpson’s hilarious hoax on the Warminster skywatchers in 1970 (see FT331:40-47). Essentially, Simpson and his co-conspirators shone a purple light from across the way from the skywatchers and then discreetly made off, and that was about it. A lengthy report appeared in due course in Flying Saucer Review, with solemn analyses of photographs and descriptions of the light behaving in ways it didn’t and couldn’t have. When FSR editor Charles Bowen learned the truth, he was incandescent, and rather ruder about Simpson and his cohorts than one would expect from such a mild-mannered man. But still. For those prepared to absorb the lesson, the Simpson ‘experiment’ did have many a ramification for UFO reports, and perhaps for experiences too.
We could go on for many more pages about the joys of Magonia, but that will have to do. It was a unique, original publication, and an essential addition to the fortean bookshelf. Pretty much as much fun as listening to the Beatles.
“YOU LEAVE THE PENNSYLVANIA STATION ’BOUT A QUARTER TO FOUR,
READ A MAGAZINE AND SOON YOU’RE IN BALTIMORE” Mack Gordon, Chattanooga Choo Choo