Just Another Tin Foil Hat Presents

Jerome Clark

Zelia Edgar

Beyond the Fray Publishing 2022

Pb, 217pp, £10.99, ISBN 9781954528222

Zelia Edgar, a young Wisconsin woman, operates a YouTube channel, JustAnotherTinFoilHat, devoted to fortean poetry, spooky sound effects and general otherworldliness. Way back when I started out as a junior anomalist, when the Internet did not exist either in the real world or in my imagination, such things would have defied my sense of the possible far more radically than UFOs and monsters.

Still, here we are, with this book, named after her programme. If the programme is strikingly innovative, the book is strangely retro in a whole other way I would not have thought possible. From her video images, Edgar could not have been alive in the 1970s. On the other hand, I was an active writer and investigator in those days.

Back then I was in thrall to John Keel, before I grew disillusioned with him a few years later and became a blistering critic of what I judged an inflated reputation. To me Keel, who died in 2009, seems a fading figure from an ever more distant era. Edgar, who has gone so far as to write a poem in his honour, clearly feels otherwise.

Instead of pushing Keel’s ideas (addled as they could be) forward, Edgar plants her flag in the Keelian world of the mid-1950s into the early 1970s, reclaiming the stories Keel and associates chronicled during that lively period. Some of the cases – in particular those involving hairy-biped encounters in Illinois and Indiana – I investigated myself, though I go uncredited in the main text. Perhaps Edgar knows of my sour later decades with her idol.

For me, it’s amusing to reconnect with this big, unbroken fortean circle. I enjoyed the book, too. Edgar, a close reader, is a good writer with an endearing sense of humour. I look forward to what she has to say when she makes it to the 21st century.

★★★