‘The Super Natural,’ or How to Write about ‘Woo’

I blogged here before about things disappearing in my house — kitchen utensils, corkscrews, keys, etc. (See “Pixie Problems, or Working Things Out with the ‘Cousins’ (1)” and Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.)

Things have been better since then. There is a pentagram pendant that has disappeared and re-appeared at least three times, but as long as I am wearing it or have it in my pocket, “they” leave it alone.

And then a book disappeared, almost snatched out of my hands.

The book was The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained (2016), a collaboration between scholar Jeffrey Kripal (I think of him as “the professor of woo”) and author and experiencer Whitley Strieber. (The 2017 paperback edition had the subtitle “Why the Unexplained is Real.“)

Strieber had been a novelist with several bestsellers in the horror category, such as The Wolfen and The Hunger, both of which were adapted as movies.1 All this took a new path after publication of his 1987 bestseller, Communion, about his family’s experience with “the Visitors” at their Catskills home in 1985–86. Communion in turn spawned follow-ups, a podcast, and a whole website, Unknown Country, devoted to UFO-related paranormal experiences.

It’s important to note that Communion never states that the “Visitors” were offworld visitors who came from their home planet to study Earthlings, although many people assume that. Blame the thirty-five previous years of “flying saucers” stories and films. The first movie was, in fact, The Flying Saucer, (1950).

What it was, says Jeffrey Kripal, was a Goddess experience — and that was something many readers could not grasp.

Not only did [Strieber] speak his secrets in public, but he also spoke reverently and fearfully of a divine presences that was feminine, that broke and rode him like a horse . . . by so doing he spoke of a presence at the very heart of the unconscious of the religious West, a presence that has been repressed and denied for three millennia. He spoke of Her (151).

Beyond Kripal’s reading of Communion as fundamentally a work of Goddess mysticism, part of the eternal matter of sex, death, and the sacred, this is a book on how to approach these experiences as a writer.

But first, who took my book?

According to Amazon, I bought it in 2018. I found it to be profounding unsettling — and I have been around this block more than once. I think the sentence that stopped me was one of Strieber’s: “The living, who we call the dead, come close to us now, calling to us to open our minds to a new vision of ourselves” (245).

I write “one of Strieber’s,” because the book is arranged in alternating chapters, each author taking his turn. More on that below.

So Super Natural stayed in the bedroom bookcase, where live all the books that we don’t want casual visitors to be noticing. Then came a day earlier this year when I wanted to share something in with my wife. I pulled it off the shelf and set it down (on the bed?), but it was more like something took it, because I could not find it again. She and I both looked, to the point of checking under the bedroom furniture with a flashlight. No book. (And they have not given it back either.)

“OK, housewights,” I said, “Are you more powerful than Amazon?” I re-ordered another hardback copy, this time from an affiliate seller, a Goodwill store in Tacoma. It duly arrived, and it has not vanished. So I could re-read it and attach sticky notes.

‘Super Natural’ as a Writing Guide

I call it a guide to writing about “woo,” in other words, the paranormal, the Other, the unexplained, whatever you care to call it. Quoting William James, Kripal speaks of a “future science” of “radical empricism, that is, one that took every human experience, however strange or apparenty impossible, under its careful gaze without prejudice of assumption. This book is an attempt to practice just such a radical empiricism” (40).

What Kripal in particular has done is set out series of techniques by which scholars can approach something like Strieber’s experience — and which Strieber himself employs to some extent in his chapters.

First is the “phenomenological cut,” just taking the experiences on their own terms and seting aside “the questions of their possible external source, cause, or truth value” (44). It is hard to just describe what is happening without fitting it into your religous framework (or lack of one) or your world view.

There are more: Kripal also discusses techniques of comparison, history, hermeneutics, and erotics.2 For example, in his summary these these approaches, he notes under hermeneutics

Consider the possibility that some of these encounters may be mediated expressions of another form of mind (maybe ours) making contact with the human ego and transmtting some symbolic signal. Recognize that, generally speaking, extraordinary visions and experiences are ot what they seem on the surface, that they must be interpreted. Recognize the roles of fantasy and projection in the production of these potential signals, but do not assume that everything imagined is imaginary. Imagine double. Hone your Hermes practice, your hermenutics (341).

Super Natural is a book that I will return to on its own merits. But I urge anyone trying to work in Pagan studies, esotericism, or around the shunned mystic fringes of any other religious tradition to study is a manual of academic craft as well,

  1. I’ll always remember Susan Sarandon as the reluctant but erotic vampire. []
  2. His scholarly career began with studying Bengali Tantra and the worship of Kali, and he had . . . experiences. So he is not a newbie here. []

‘Lodge Tales’ Is a Native American Paranormal Podcast

My overall favorite paranormal podcast is Timothy Renner’s Strange Familiars, which now has logged 465 episodes.

Its style is low-key. Usually people discuss their experiences with “the Other” in conversation with the host. Sometimes he and a friend or two take a late-night walk on the Appalachian Trail or another locale in south central Pennsylvania looking for strange lights, sounds, and sightings. In others, his wife, Alison, discusses with him notable long-ago crimes, paranormal experiences, and Timothy’s personal favorite—the life stories of 19th-century hermits and “wild men.”

Some time back a man from the Blackfeet Nation in Montana named Rod Williamson came on to share his stories. He must have been a regular listener who decided “I can do this too,” because he started his own podcast, Lodge Tales, which is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Red Circle, and elsewhere. And of course there is a Patreon page, where he writes,

I’m a Native American from the Blackfeet Tribe in Montana. I’ve always had an interest in ghost stories and strange encounters. Today I go out and interview fellow Natives about their experiences in these areas. Join us!

Lodge Tales is a place where Native Americans can share their experiences of the supernatural, paranormal, bigfoot, ufos, or anything that comes up!

I have listened to a number of Lodge Tales episodes since Timothy Renner promo’d it on his podcast. So far, Williamson has gotten a lot of material just from family and friends there in Montana. Some of the stories sound similar to those told by the people who appear on Strange Familiars, including encounters with Bigfoot and other unusual animals.

One difference is that an early interviewee was a Blackfeet cop, whose description of multiple police units responding to a
Goatman” sighting has become the podcast’s intro. (The first officer jumps on the radio, and he screams out, ‘Holy ****!”)

The Town Pump fuel station-convenience store in Browning, Montana, is the site of a “devil” being caught on CCTV. The figure enters the back seat of a car that later wrecks, with the driver being killed (Google Street View).

While many stories fit into the “North American paranormal” range, some are culturally distinctive. Interviewees often have stories involving hauntings at old Indian boarding schools, for example, while a young woman working in a nursing home plagued with mysterious voices declares that co-workers smudged it every month, but the voices kept returning, so they were going to try a more powerful ceremony.

Terryn (guest): “Little hands kind of like drug me up [from a stream]. . . I could see a little tiny trail [to my aunt’s house]. I feel like Little People helped me. They scare me at the same time; but at the same time they helped me and my brother to cross rivers, which is weird.

Rod (host): Little People . . . I’m really intrigued by them. They really help us a lot. I’ve heard good stories about them — and bad ones. They’re everywhere, in every country, not just here. They look like different things, too. Ours look like little Indians, like little shrunk Indians. I’m really fascinated by these stories. . . . There was something they seen in you that was worth their while, to take pity on you

. Lodge Tales, Episode 9, “Terryn and Mike”

Are there truly cultural differences in paranormal phenomena? Maybe kind-of sort-of, but “The Phenomenon” is so slippery to begin with that it is hard to say.

One thing that I appreciate about Lodge Tales geographical. It seems like most of American paranormal podcasting and video-making centers on the southern Appalachian Mountains. So it’s good to get something from the Rocky Mountains too.

Bigfoot on the High Wire?

Sabina, magician and dancer (Paranormal Cirque photo).

Everything is paranormal these days. Even Stormy Daniels, the porn actress whom Donald Trump made famous, also bills herself as a paranomal investigator and medium. (“How to arouse a ghost”?)

Driving past a shopping mall parking lot last week, I saw an assortment of new-looking trailers and motorhomes and circus tents. The paranormal circus was in town, specially, the  R-rated “Paranormal Cirque”  touring unit of the Cirque Italia.

Under this Clown Castle, the black and red big top tent, Acrobats of the Air, Illusionists, freaks, mysterious creatures and all the elements that make one think of a “normal” Circus but that of normal has very little!

A new show with breathtaking implications always poised between fun and the most uninhibited fear that will transport you to a dark world inhabited by creatures with incredible circus art abilities.

A crazy yet fun fusion between Circus, theatre, and cabaret in perfect harmony with the evolution of a show that brings you back to when we dream … and when we had nightmares and fantasies. Scare

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, encompass, amuse and surprise are the ingredients for a mixture of emotions impossible to forget. This is truly a Paranormal experience like no other.

Mothman would be a great act, but he probably does not want to leave the East Coast.

Power Couples of the Paranormal

I know that I have sampled only a few of the many, many paranormal, occult, Pagan, and esoteric podcasts and video channels out there. (Feel free to add your faves in the comments.)

But when  you look at podcasts done by people who are partners in real life, I can think of two sets of contenders: Jessi Leigh and Joe Doyle of the Hellbent Holler YouTube Channel and Greg and Dana Newkirk of Hellier fame, who now have a new podcast, The Haunted Objects. (The former website, not updated since 2020, was The Week in Weird.)

Hellier, a documentary series (two seasons) that compressed several years of the Newkirks’ and their associates’ attempt to find the story behind some mysterious communications:

In 2012, Greg Newkirk received an email from a man calling himself David Christie, who claimed that he and his family were being terrorized by unearthly creatures by night. After exchanging emails, David disappeared. For the next five years, the case only got stranger, as more connections and mysterious emails came in. Then, in 2017, Greg and a team of researchers traveled to rural Kentucky, not knowing what they would uncover, or how deep they would discover the case might go.

Dana Newkirk using a God Helmet in a Hellier episode.

The story was compelling. (I thought Season 2 lagged a bit in the middle, but it finished strong.)  The videography and editing were better than a lot of what you see on ghost-hunting or Bigfoot-hunting TV shows. And it was released in 2020 just before people can to be forced indoors — meaning they could live vicariously through the investigators’ travels in eastern Kentucky. You can stream or download it or get it on Blu-Ray at the site.

It not only had thousands of viewers but has attracted the attention of scholars of Western esotercism and “the weird” in general. For instance

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Rejected Religion podcast host Stephanie Shea explains it to guest Aaron French in this November 2022 episode and earlier devoted to episodes to Hellier and High Strangeness. Here is the first one, from January 2021.

The Newkirks also manage museum of the paranormal, and the Haunted Object podcast builds each episode around a particular item, such as a plank from the Long Island house infamous for the Amityville Horror, leading to a freewheeling and often comic dialog between them and their producer, Connor Randall.

Jessi’s T-shirt proclaims “Make cryptozoologiy dangerous again.”

Meanwhile, Jessi and Joe are out in the woods. The two cryptid-hunters live in a former South Carolina textile-mill town but met when they were both bartending in New Orleans. As Jessi puts it,

I was born and raised in the mountains of western North Carolina, but when my wanderlust took hold I escaped to the Deep South. I spent 10 years in New Orleans, in and out of bars, swamps and graveyards. Eventually I became homesick for the mountains, trees and endless adventure of a darkened wood. It was time to leave the sirens, grime and crime behind. Along with my partner Joe, I moved back to Appalachia and began seeking out the mysteries and legends that still live in the hills we call home. Using the latest gear and equipment, we travel deep into the forests of Appalachia to gather evidence of the weird, strange and supernatural that roams this ancient slice of heaven.

In the spirit of Jessi’s T-shirt, they investigate areas of Bigfoot sightings, Dogman sitings (a sort of upright werewolf), and other mystery beasts.

Their technology includes state-of-the-art night-vision gear, audio recorders, video and still cameras, survival gear, and personal weapons. You could call them “preppers of the paranormal.”

The last is not a question of “What caliber for Dogman?” but rather an honest reponse to the fact they are moving through areas where they could encounter humans who are, let’s say, sort of feral.

Joe and Jessi push their own boundaries, which leads to lines like “Did you hear like a scream?” or “If every night felt like this [eerie], I wouldn’t do this” or “That was not a coyote. That was not a coyote!” (All quotes from “Land Between the Lakes, Part 2: The Search for Dogman Contiues.

Their videos have a respectable number of followers, although not as many as the Newkirks’, and of course they have their own merchandise.

Locales

Greg and Dana: Generally indoors in haunted buildings, sometimes caves, in various states.

Joe and Jessi: Outdoors in forests of the southern Appalachian Mountains (north Georgia), Cumberland Plateau, and the Land Between the Lakes (Tennessee-Kentucky). Generally public land, such as the Chattahochee-Oconee National Forest.

Methodology

Joe and Jessi: Stalking through the woods, investigating ruins, utilizing audio and visual recorders, and utilizing visible and infrared ligjhts at night.

Greg and Dana: Investigations of haunted places and ghost experiences, utiilizing psychic impressions, amplified by technology such as the Estes Method and the God Helmet. Occasional ritual.

Production Values

Greg and Dana: Professional-level video.

Jessi and Joe: DIY level, but getting better all the time. Jessi is their editor.

What I Wish They Would Do

Get expert advice.

In the first season of Hellier, I remember talking the screen as the participants fumbled around seeking some information, “Why don’t you go to the local library and talk to the local history librarian? Even small libraries often have one, and they want to share!”

Later in Season 2 they do just that when researching a vanished restaurant in Kentucky and are amazed that the local library has photos of it. Libaries! Who knew?

Jessi and Joe spend a lot of time with boots on the ground, but I with they could balance that with more research instead, of, for instance, just wandering around old federal government buildings in the Land Between the Lakes and asking, “What was this for? Was it fortified against Dogman?”

Granted, federal agencies often do a poor job of preserving their own institutional history — as a Forest Service brat, I know this.

Also, an experienced hunter or wildlife biologist could offer alternative explanations to “How did these deer bones get here?” or “What made those scratches on the tree?”

Yet even though I sometimes say to the screen, “I bet a black bear did that,” there are times when I have no easy naturalistic explanation for what they encounter — and that is what keeps me coming back.

Old Issues of “The Ley Hunter” Available as Digital PDFs

cover image, The Ley Hunter no. 66, 1975

Cover of issue 66, published June-July 1975, edited by Paul Screeton.

The Ley Hunter was a British zine devoted to “earth mysteries” (which could include such things as Fairy encounters as well as ley lines, etc.) published from 1965–1998. As Isaac Koi describes it,

Its website described it as “the longest running journal to cover the ‘earth mysteries’ complex of study areas (it invented the term over 20 years ago!)”, including “‘ley lines;, (earth tie geophysical) energies (studied from both a primary sensing – experiential – point of view and that of physical monitoring), folklore, traditional lifeways, archaeology, all aspects of geomancy or sacred geography, shamanism and other aspects of archaic consciousness, unexplained natural phenomena, and so on”.

Its first two editors, Jimmy Goddard and Paul Screeton, have given permission for their issues to be digitzed and uploaded, covering 1965–1976. Paul Devereux, the last editor, did not give permission, and Isaac Koi explains why at his blog, where you will find the link to download each issue in PDF format.

Loads of vintage paranormal zine goodness here!

UPDATE: Issues from 1976–1986 are available at another site.

A Quick Video Introduction to Fairy Studies

Early in the twentieth century, the famous physicist Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937), “the father of nuclear physics,”  is supposed to have remarked snarkily that all science was either physics or “stamp-collecting.”1

By “stamp-collecting,” I have always assumed he meant collecting and classifying, in that a geologist of his time might have been mainly occupied with classifying rocks and minerals or an entymologist concerned with classifying insects. (These disciplines — and others — now include much more.)

“Stamp-collecting” likewise describes a lot of paranormal studies. The famed Charles Fort (1874–1932 was the master of it.((His life almost parallels Rutherford’s. Interesting.)) “As a young adult, Fort wanted to be a naturalist, collecting sea shells, minerals, and birds” (Wikipedia). The sheer size of his collections had an effect, however.

Fort is acknowledged by religious scholars such as Jeffrey J. Kripal and Joseph P. Laycock as a pioneering theorist of the paranormal who helped define “paranormal” as a discursive category and provided insight into its importance in human experience. Although Fort is consistently critical of the scientific study of abnormal phenomena, he remains relevant today for those who engage in such studies

Back in the the early 1690s — contemporanous with the Salem witch trials — the Rev. Robert Kirk((A minister in the then-large Scottish Episcopal Church)) was not afraid to theorize, producing a handwritten book on fairies that latter became The Secret Commonwealth. Maybe his MA at Edinburgh University prepared him.

His attempt to fit the fairies into a Great Chain of Being might not appeal to everyone, but at least it gave him a theoretical lens through which to consider them.

Kirk proposed that the reason that the fairies appeared to humanity was to convince us that an invisible realm exists, and that it’s not entirely out of reach. Their occasional interactions with humans served as both a “caution and warning” that we are not alone in the world, and that unseen, intelligent forces occasionally meddled in our affairs. Maybe these forces are still at work. (video transcript)

Then it was mostly a lot of “stamp collecting” until astronomer Jacques Vallée wrote Passport to Magonia, in which he rejected the “extraterrestrial hypothesis” for UFOs and replaced it with something more multidimensional. Until the work of Jeffrey Kripal, I would rank Kirk’s and Vallée’s books as the most important when it comes to fairy studies, more even than Evans-Wentz’ The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries.

We still have people who are solely Bigfoot-hunters or UFO researchers or ghost-hunters or whatever, but thanks to Vallée, it is more and more common to see all of these as part of something bigger: “the phenomenon.”((Some BIgfoot researchers still seek a flesh-and-blood “wood ape,” which might be less psychologically threatening than an interdimensional big hairy critter.))

(Video from Think Anomalous. I saw it first at Hecate Demeter.)

  1. Variations on the saying include “That which is not measurable is not science. That which is not physics is stamp collecting” and “Physics is the only real science. The rest are just stamp collecting.” []

“Goblins, Goat-Gods, and Gates”: Weird Studies does “Hellier”

I wrote about my encounter with 2019’s take-off[[It doesn’t seem right for say “went viral” right now, don’t you think?))paranormal web series hit Hellier in this post, “Don’t Follow the Lights across the Moor, said the Monk.”

Now my favorite podcasters, J. F. Martel and Phil Ford of Weird Studies, have produced the episode on Hellier and related things — with them, there will always be related things. Usually they send me to the library website with a bunch of interlibrary-loan requests.

It is called “Goblins, Goat-Gods, and Gates.” And you see will that there is a references list.

The podcasters write:

On the night before this episode of Weird Studies was released, a bunch of folks on the Internet performed a collective magickal working. Prompted by the paranormal investigator Greg Newkirk, they watched the final episode of the documentary series Hellier at the same time — 10:48 PM EST — in order to see what would happen. Listeners who are familiar with this series, of which Newkirk is both a protagonist and a producer, will recall that the last episode features an elaborate attempt at gate opening involving no less than Pan, the Ancient Greek god of nature. If we weren’t so cautious (and humble) in our imaginings, we at Weird Studies might consider the possibility that this episode is a retrocausal effect of that operation. In it, we discuss the show that took the weirdosphere by storm last year, touching on topics such as subterranean humanoids, the existence of “Ascended Masters,” Aleister Crowley’s secret cipher, the Great God Pan, and the potential dangers of opening gates to other worlds … or of leaving them closed.

No, I haven’t listened to it yet. Weird Studies episodes are saved for long drives, and M. and I are going to the city tomorrow.

New Pagan, Paranormal Podcasts Added to the Blogroll

The trees have eyes.

You can buy this artwork in various forms at Strange Familiars’  Patreon site.

Readers, I have reworked the blogroll (right-hand column) to create a new “Podcast” category.

If you are looking at a single post, the blogroll might not display for you. In that case, click the main blog title or the banner photo at the top to switch to the main page.

I had few podcasts mixed in the blogs, but I am listening to more now, and I decided that they deserved their own category.

For instance, I mentioned Strange Familiars recently in my post, “Don’t Follow the Lights across the Moor, said the Monk.” Apparently that episode — with host Timothy Renner interviewing Br. Richard Hendrick about fairies, ghosts, and poltergeists — was their highest-rated ever.

Weird Studies is another solid favorite. Co-host Phil Ford is a musicologist at Indiana University. Who knew you could do such strange and edgy stuff under the roof of the School of Music? About every other time that I listen to Phil and his co-host, J. F. Martel, I have to visit the library.

Some of these podcasts are easily downloaded from their home sites, plus you can get them on Google Play, Apple Podcast, and usually various other podcast sites. I use Apple gear, but I don’t like Apple Podcast very much and prefer to download individual episodes to iTunes.

Don’t Follow the Lights across the Moor, said the Monk, or Why We Learn Nothing New about Fairies

William James in Brazil, about age 23 (Wikimedia Commons)

The famous American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842–1910) was also a paranormal researcher, chiefly in the area of Spiritualism and mediumship. Toward the end of his life, he wrote about a problem that still vexes ufologists, ghost-hunters, and everyone else engaging “the phenomenon.” He starts by speaking of a fellow psychical researcher, Prof. Henry Sidgwick:

 

Like all [psychical research] founders, Sidgwick hoped for a certain promptitude of result; and I heard him say, the year before his death, that if anyone had told him at the outset that after twenty years he would be in the same identical state of doubt and balance that he started with, he would have deemed the prophecy incredible. It appeared impossible that that amount of handling evidence should bring so little finality of decision.

My own experience has been similar to Sidgwick’s. For twenty-five years I have been in touch with the literature of psychical research, and have had acquaintance with numerous “researchers.” I have also spent a good many hours (though far fewer than I ought to have spent) in witnessing (or trying to witness) phenomena. Yet I am theoretically no “further” than I was at the beginning; and I confess that at times I have been tempted to believe that the Creator has eternally intended this department of nature to remain baffling, to prompt our curiosities and hopes and suspicions all in equal measure, so that, although ghosts and clairvoyances, and raps and messages from spirits, are always seeming to exist and can never be fully explained away, they also can never be susceptible of full corroboration.((William James, “The Last Report: The Final Impressions of a Psychical Researcher,” in William James and Psychical Research, ed. Gardner Murphey and Robert O. Ballou, (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961), 310. Originally published in The American Magazine, October 1909.))

James’s frustration was mentioned in an episode of Weird Studies, a podcast produced by musicologist Phil Ford and writer-filmmaker J. F. Martel.((Both are Canadian, although Ford teaches at Indiana University.)) Weird Studies is devoted to “a scholarly field that doesn’t and can’t exist,” but they try.((The Weird is that which resists any settled explanation or frame of reference. It is the bulging file labelled “other/misc.” in our mental filing cabinet, full of supernatural entities, magical synchronicities, and occult rites. But it also appears when a work of art breaks in on our habits of perception and ordinary things become uncanny.The Weird is easiest to define as whatever lies on the further side of a line between what we can easily accept from our world and what we cannot. And it defines an attitude towards whatever lies on that side of the line: a willingness to remain suspended between explanations and abide in strangeness.))

James’s comments also reminded of a comment by some UFO researcher I once read who said that during the Fifties and Sixties there was this rising anticipation that Something Was Going to Happen. Maybe the Space Brothers would simultaneously land in Red Square, Lafayette Square (by the White House) and Brasiilia — or whatever. But the climax never happened; instead, the same stories repeat and repeat.

“The Fairy Faith,” Jim Fitzpatrick, 1989.

A few months ago, I finally read Robert Kirk’s The Secret Commonwealth, one of the classics of Fairy literature, written but not published in 1692. I recommend Brian Walsh’s annotated version, The Secret Commonwealth and the Fairy Belief Complex, 2002. Kirk wrote,

These Siths or Fairies they call Sleagh Maith or the Good People  . . . are said to be of middle nature between Man and Angel, as were Daemons thought to be of old; of intelligent fluidous Spirits, and light changeable bodies (lyke those called Astral) somewhat of the nature of a condensed cloud, and best seen in twilight. These bodies be so pliable through the sublety of Spirits that agitate them, that they can make them appear or disappear at pleasure.

And can we say anymore today, three centuries later? We ask a few more questions: Do the Good People associate with certain ethnic groups? Do they migrate? Can they change shapes (orbs of light, silvery “aliens,” tall hairy bipeds, etc.)? But do we really know anymore than Robert Kirk did?

A few years back, when I was co-chair of Contemporary Pagan Studies within the American Academy of Religion, seeing a rise in the number of “fairy festivals,” which seemed to overlap Pagan festivals to some degree, as well as new books on the Fairy Folk, I suggested all that as a topic for one of our sessions, but my idea got no traction. Too early, maybe.

Now there are more books((Some of them seem to say, “Fairies are dangerous, but if you read my book, I will tell you how contact them.”)) and even Cherry Hills Seminary, the most viable Pagan seminary, is offering a class called “The Fair Folk: A Thanatological Perspective.”

Class Description: Who are the Fair Folk? Many do not expect one of the answers to be “the dead”!  In this Insights course we will parse through the different types of Fair Folk (focusing on the Irish traditions), examine species of Faery with clearly human folklore (including hauntings, burials and premature deaths) and contemplate the possibility of the Fair Folk as ancestral figures.

So where is the monk? You promised us a monk!

Another podcast I sometimes listen to is Strange Familiars, and in a recent episode, “A Monastic View of the Other,” co-host TImothy Renner interviewed Br. Richard Hendrick, an Irish Capuchin (Franciscan) monk and meditation teacher. He used to manage the Capuchins’ friary and retreat center in Donegal. If you click through the photos, I think that one shows the fairy hill described in the interview.

Brother Richard tells some stories of house-cleansings, where people thought they were disturbed by ghosts or other entities. He comes across as level-headed and compassionate, and he stresses that one cannot respond to such requests by charging in and (my words) firing off Latin invocations while throwing incense grenades.

And Then There Is Hellier

Inverted pentagram? Really?

In another podcast, TImothy Renner of Strange Familiars mentioned that some of his music (he is a musician too) is used in Season Two of the paranormal documentary Hellier, which reminded me that I needed to download it.

Brother Richard talks about being spiritually grounded, avoiding obsession, and “not following the lights across the moor,” In other words, don’t let yourself get sucked in to the point where you have one foot on the Other Side.

But if there is anyone who does “follow the lights,” it is all the ghost-hunters and paranormal investigators out there, who show up with their spotlights and cameras and recording equipment and digital thermometers and other gadgetry and announce, “All right, Bigfoot, where are you? Goblins, show yourselves! We come in peace! [Aside: “Are you getting a reading?”]

Here is the synopsis:

In 2012, Greg Newkirk received an email from a man calling himself David Christie, who claimed that he and his family were being terrorized by unearthly creatures by night. After exchanging emails, David disappeared. For the next five years, the case only got stranger, as more connections and mysterious emails came in. Then, in 2017, Greg and a team of researchers [chiefly Dana Newkirk, Karl Pfeiffer, and Conor Randall] traveled to rural Kentucky, not knowing what they would uncover, or how deep they would discover the case might go.

Back at Weird Studies, J. F. Martel observes, “If you ever wondered what Samuel Beckett would have written if he had developed an interest in the paranormal, Hellier may be the answer.”

Yeah, Waiting for Goblin, that’s it.

On the plus side, the show’s production values are high. I have seen stuff on cable TV that was a lot worse. On the negative, sometimes I just want to reach into the screen and grab them:

If y’all are “digital natives,” why did you wait five years to have a competent IT guy check the headers on that email — which reveal that it did not come from eastern Kentucky at all?

Do you know anything about using public records? Don’t you realize that the volunteer fire department in a small town will know where everything is?

Don’t you carry a good GPS receiver? If you can’t write down the address when you think you have found “the house,” at least get its coordinates, which will save you a lot of driving around later, plus you can research its ownership history with the county assessor.

Since the initial email sounds a lot like Whitley Strieber’s experience in Communionand his books are on the Newkirks’ shelves, I am surprised Strieber’s name does not come up. (At least so far. I am only just into Season Two, so no spoilers, please.)

One book that does come up a lot is John Keel’s The Mothman Prophecies.It took me a long time to read that, because the title put me off, but it remains a classic study of how the researcher can go over the edge, off “across the moor.” The Hellier group refer to it a lot when they raise questions such as, does experiencing uncanny synchronicities mean that you are on the right track, or are they just a distraction? Are they “signal” or are they “noise”?

And to go back to William James, after twenty years, will you have learned anything substantive at all? Or is the real story the subjective experience of the researchers? I have been there, a little, and I know how fast the paranoia can grow.

“Witness of Another World” is a Powerful Documentary about “Visitor” Encounters

Aside from an occasional excursion, I am not much into UFO studies. It was years after it came out that I read Jacques Vallée’s1 Passport to Magonia, and it shaped my thinking.

I put its thesis like this: Instead of chugging through interstellar space to Earth, the UFO-nauts have always been here. “They” appear in many different shapes, some humanoid, some not, as it suits their fancy. Sometimes They just like to mess with us for reasons we do not understand. Or in more refined language,

As an alternative to the extraterrestrial visitation hypothesis, Vallée has suggested a multidimensional visitation hypothesis. This hypothesis represents an extension of the ETH where the alleged extraterrestrials could be potentially from anywhere. The entities could be multidimensional beyond space-time, and thus could coexist with humans, yet remain undetected (Wikipedia).

Back in the 1970s, Vallée and his wife flew to Argentina to investigate the case of Juan Pérez, a 12-year-old boy from a gaucho family in northern Argentina. Sent out one morning to bring in the family herd, Juan saddled his favorite horse, Cometa (Comet), and rode off into the pastures. On his ride, Juan encountered . . . something . . . that seemed to be a typical flying saucer. Tying Cometa to the craft’s ladder, he went up into it, he said.

There he encountered two beings. When he went home and told his story, he soon became a UFO celebrity. Cometa, however, sickened and died mysteriously only a few days after the encounter.

Juan’s life was wrecked. Call it PTSD. Call it a bad case of susto (soul loss). He fled the ufology scene. He ended up a fifty-ish bachelor, living an isolated life with just his dogs, working seasonally on neighboring ranches and otherwise alone.

There he was until an Argentine filmmaker, Alan Stivelman, decided to reunite him with Vallée, with whom he had had a good relationship as a youth. Vallée was enthusiastic about the plan — all he wanted was a couple of months to study intensively to improve his Spanish.

Stivelman’s documentary, Witness of Another World, is just beautiful movie-making. Whether on Argentinian pampas or up north in the jungle villages of Guaraní Indians, who play an important part in the documentary (Juan has some Guaraní ancestry) or exploring the texture’s of Juan’s crumbling house, it is good to look at.

It is a story of a man brought back from the edge, a spiritual rescue mission, where ufology meets shamanism meets a compassionate reunion of old friends —  the eighty-year-old scientist and the grown-up but still frightened gaucho boy.

You can rent it (download) for $4.99 or buy it (download) for $12.99. It is on Amazon Prime as well.

Listen to what Jacques Vallée has to say about “the phenomenon,” his term for the whole UFO/demon/fairy/visitor complex. Watch what the shamans do. And remember that “They” are not necessarily our friends.

Bonus: On his Dreamland podcast, Whitley Strieber interviews director Alan Stivelman, with contributions from Jacques Vallée.

  1. Born in France, Vallée has spent most of his life in the US. His career includes astronomy, software engineering, venture capitalism — and UFO studies. []