Anomalist Books

“At last, someone doing scientific studies on astrology and publishing their results,” begins Robert Marks’ review of Astrology Off the Beaten Track: A Scientific Study of Planets and Personality by Dr. Suzel Fuzeau-Braesch, who died in 2008. Marks states that “Her research projects were ingenious. She did studies on twins and world events. She even studied dogs and cows!” He ends his detailed, largely complimentary review with these words: “The book…is well written with simple, easy to read language…Of course, the work has to be throughly examined and we have to see if it can be replicated. Of so, then it provides support for the earlier Gauquelin work, and that would indicate that there might be something to astrology after all.” Marks’ review appears in the Winter 2009 issue of the Journal of Scientific Exploration.

The reviews of The Secrets of Dellschau: The Sonora Aero Club and the Airships of the 1800s, A True Story by Dennis Crenshaw in collaboration with P. G. Navarro are beginning to appear. “We love this book because it tells an utterly unique story which may well be related to the UFO mystery,” writes Jim Mosely in Saucer Smear. “Or, it may not.” What’s the book about? In a review of the book in Magonia Peter Rogerson writes: “When he died at the great age of 92 in 1923, Texas butcher Charles A. Dellschau left behind a secret and a mystery. These were a series of notebooks, filled with paintings of fantastic flying machines, which only came to light when his descendants had a clearout. By a process of serendipity they came to the attention of graphic designer and ufologist Peter Navarro. By decoding and translating writings in and around the pictures, Narvarro pieced together a tale of Dellschau’s involvemnt in a secret society of inventors living in gold-rush California. He created a vivid cast of over 60 characters, and a range of Heath Robinsonish flying machines, the Aeros…They were the work of this secret group, The Sonora Aero Club, and its even more shadowy backer the NYMZA.” Were these craft connected somehow to the well-known UFO flap of 1896-1897? Magonia ends its review with these words: “Whether the audience is ufologist or art appreciator, this broken old man is leading us back into the realms of pure childhood imagination.” Moseley, near the end of his review, says straight-out: “This is a wonderfully thought-provoking book…” And he kindly commends Anomalist Books “for their fortitude in publishing books of this kind.”

Outbreak! The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behavior continues to generate press, including a column entitled “An outbreak of confusion: Mass hysteria, outlandish obsessions, bizarre sects: What lies at the heart of extraordinary social behaviour?” in The Guardian (UK) in August and a mention in a story called “Oh, Maya! Is 2012 the end? Film boosts doomsday frenzy” in USA Today in November. But it’s the reviews that concern us here and they have been uniformly positive. Inconvenient History calls the book “a wildly entertaining, absurdly ambitious, astutely critical, deceivingly academic and nearly definitive study of the myriad crazes, manias, panics, scares, fads, fashions and other sundry sociogenic phenomena that have made history while eluding historians.” This “Cthulhu-sized tome,” writes Nick Redfern in UFO Mystic, is not just “scholarly; but it is also highly informative, insightful, illuminating and witty… A fantastic read.” And in Cryptomundo, Loren Coleman, though not particularly pleased with the book’s handling of some subjects (”I find their black and white skeptical approach to a few of the encyclopedia’s events as being wholly too psychological-based, without any appreciation for the possible underlying factual reality to be found in some of these encounters”), nevertheless concludes that “the book is a masterpiece.” The International Cognition and Culture Institute blog found the book to be “quite an impressive endeavour that can be used for scholarly purposes (it is well referenced) and for fun (because people do weird things sometimes).” And finally, FOAFtale News, the newsletter of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research, notes that “It is a real encyclopedia, containing some 340 articles of very variable length. The scope and diversity of the bibliography are remarkable; it includes numerous references from other languages than English. The large choice of nineteenth century French studies, mostly medical, of visions and apparitions is especially notable. Original sources are often referred to, and the quotations of Renaissance or seventeenth century books are numerous. This does not exclude modern references as will be shown in the example from Iraq…Exceptional by its scope and the diversity of its sources, this Encyclopedia is an essential work instrument for those interested in the surprising extent of non-standard collective behavior.”

We have just reprinted Patrick Huyghe’s Swamp Gas Times: My Two Decades on the UFO Beat. It’s the same as the original Paraview Press version but with a new cover. What we didn’t have then that we have now is Colin Bennett’s sparkling review of the book that eventually appeared online at Phenomena Magazine, which, sadly, is no longer being published. Take it away, Colin: “H.G. Wells once wrote An Experiment in Autobiography, and this title is a good description of Swamp Gas Times by Patrick Huyghe. There are very few books about UFOs that put the phenomenon in a setting of the character and atmosphere of a workaday journalistic world…[Huyghe’s] vision raises the sheer thrill of our dawning realization that we are indeed living within domains of high strangeness…What makes this remarkable book special is that it relates all these matters to American journalism as it evolved over two decades. Both journalism and the UFO inhabit unstable worlds; magazines, newspapers and staff are shown as being in an almost constant state of change. Editors, private financiers, policies, all can change within a matter of months… Thus his UFO reporting is against a professional background of varying levels of ever-changing technology, the whims of rich proprietors, and a rapidly changing print and media culture, changing again in turn as regards content and style, taste, fashion, and evolving social history. We see in Swamp Gas Times the UFO as a live cryptozoological animal, grazing on information flow as it moves through many different dimensions and interpretations of media, opinion, and changing forms of fashionable taste and expression… These stories are of a world full of hairline cracks and fissures, a world constantly crumbling at the edges of the discursive investigational eye like an M.C. Escher drawing of possible impossibilities… In the face of such things, [Huyghe] manages to combine a vigorous analytic logic with a brave ability to face the utterly absurd elements in many of the experiences he describes… Here is great insight, as well as the irresistible thrill of UFOlogy…”

It “must be one of the strangest UFO books ever written,” says Bob Girard of Arcturus Books. Or painted. He’s referring, of course, to Love in an Alien Purgatory: The Life and Fantastic Art of David Huggins, which contains a well-written text by Farah Yurdozu about David’s bizarre sexual contacts with the ETs, or whoever they are, and more than 80 of David’s paintings in full color that illustrate his contact experiences. A review of the book has also appeared at at UFO Mystic: “After a fine introduction from Farah that firmly sets the scene, that relates the history of Huggins’ experiences, and that allows us to understand what it is that drives and motivates the man himself, we see his story unfold before our eyes via a large body of very skilled artwork,” writes Nick Redfern, who calls the book “as intriguing and thought-provoking as it is unique and alternative.” And James Moseley of Saucer Smear, who “introduced” us to David Huggins and knows him well, had this to say after reading the book: “Interesting is the fact that, though most ‘experiencers’ have a specific spiritual, religious, or political agenda to push on you, David does not. He seems to live a normal life…He doesn’t claim to be a guru…Does David really believe all this, or is he putting us on for some reason? Our answer: He is absolutely sincere, but of course with no proof whatever…There are only two possibilities: Either David’s experiences are solely the product of his own imagination (i.e. they are purely ‘internal’), or they are caused by an outside source (i.e. an outside intelligence of some sort, apparently beyond our present understanding). We vote for the latter…David Huggins is a kind gentle sort of a man and good friend… [He] deserves to be taken seriously. Buy the damn book!” Then there’s UFO activist Larry W. Bryant who sums up his feelings on the book in two short words: “Huggins Rocks!”

We are pleased to announce a book that breaks new ground in our understanding of sleep paralysis experiences. That book is Dark Intrusions: An Investigation into the Paranormal Nature of Sleep Paralysis Experiences by Louis Proud, an Australian whose very personal, well-researched work will likely have a profound impact not only for what he says but the way he has said it. And we’re not the only ones singing praises to this new young author. “Louis Proud has demonstrated with this book that he is one of the most acute commentators on the paranormal to appear in recent years,” says Colin Wilson, the author of The Occult. “It gives me immense pleasure to be allowed to introduce a writer who will, I suspect, become widely admired for his enviable brilliance and clarity.” And David Hufford, Ph.D., author of The Terror That Comes in the Night, adds these words in his foreword to the book: “This insider’s account of his own sleep paralysis experiences, in detail, is of great value. Then for that insider to knowledgeably place the experience in the broad paranormal context is unique. It provides a badly needed view of the cultural/interpretive framework that this experience naturally suggests. Louis Proud has been bold and thoughtful in providing this.” We could not agree more.

Writer Mac Tonnies died this week at the age of 34, supposedly of “natural causes,” though dying at such a young age in this society is anything but natural. He was found dead in his bed in his apartment in Kansas City, Missouri. Mac was a soon-to-be author of an Anomalist Book, his long awaited work entitled The Cryptoterrestrials. I first contacted Mac after reading his clear-headed, remarkably balanced, but still full-of-wonder website on Martian anomalies, The Cydonian Imperative. I found him to be an original thinker and a terrific writer. At the time, I was the editor of Paraview Pocket Books, published by Simon & Schuster, and offered Mac a contract to write a book on the subject which became After the Martian Apocalypse. I spoke to Mac several times after the book was published and he expressed a strong desire to leave Kansas City, which he loathed. He seemed to have trouble making ends meet and was exasperated by the job market there. He ended up working at Starbucks and most recently at a call-center, in both cases a terrible waste of a wonderful mind. I saw Mac as a writer with a brilliant future and did my best to encourage him. Unfortunately, there will be no more quirky blog posts, stark photographs, or trenchant observations from Mac Tonnies anymore. He had promised to deliver his manuscript to us at the beginning of November and I will do my best to get his final work published. Mac is now posthuman, no doubt wandering among the stars from which he came. And I, along with his many friends, have a terrible case of the blues.

It’s been a long time coming, but it’s finally here. It’s the fourth in our “Artists and Anomalies” titles (with Art, Life & UFOs, Love in An Alien Purgatory, and The Secret Art), our third “September Secrets” release (with The Secret Art and Science Fiction Secrets) and probably the most anticipated Anomalist Book to date. It’s the The Secrets Of Dellschau: The Sonora Aero Club & the Airships of the 1800s, A True Story by Dennis Crenshaw in collaboration with P.G. Navarro. Who is Charles Dellschau? He was born in 1830, in Brandenburg, Prussia, and immigrated to the United States in 1853, first settling in Texas. The historical record falls silent until 1860, when he is again shown living in Texas. The so-called “lost years” of the secretive Dellschau’s life became a matter of controversy when his voluminous, illustrated notebooks surfaced nearly a half-century after his death in 1923. Dellschau’s work – consisting of ink and watercolor illustrations of fanciful flying machines to which he frequently pasted newspaper clippings – appears to tell a coherent story of the Sonora (California) Aero Club. Using an anti-gravity gas purportedly invented by one of its members, The Club allegedly turned out a series of experimental aircraft some 50 years before the Wright Brothers first took wing. Today Dellschau is recognized as one of America’s leading visionary artists, a single page of one of his notebooks now fetches thousands of dollars. Did Charles Dellschau actually spend his lost years documenting wildly improbable inventions? Were the Aero Club’s airships also responsible for many UFO sightings in America? Or is it all a mere flight of artistic fancy?

Duncan Laurie is another artist unveiling secrets. He is best known for producing architectural glass designs for such clients as Blackrock Financial Management, 9 West, Citicorp Executive Center, Anne Klein II, Electra Records, Estée Lauder, Capital Cities ABC, and many other individuals and companies throughout the world. His introduction to alternative technology and inventors three decades ago led him eventually to look into the subject of radionics, a topic much maligned by mainstream science. In his new book, The Secret Art: A Brief History of Radionic Technology for the Creative Individual, Laurie sheds some new light on this controversial subject from the point of view of an artist. The history of radionics is the story of how various inventors designed devices that employ directed intent to affect the real world. With these tools, they have promoted healing without pills or surgery, grown crops without fertilizer, restrained insect predation without pesticides, and performed a host of other seemingly impossible feats that defy mechanistic science. The Secret Art traces this astonishing process beginning with prehistoric and indigenous peoples, whose art was also a means of interacting with Nature to enhance healing, increase crop yields, and enable visionary experiences. Eventually, radionic inventors discovered by trial and error that even drawings and bizarre technology could function radionically. This discovery followed a long process of design innovation that started with mechanical devices, proceeded through a generation of electronic instruments, and most recently has been applied to computer and software technology. Laurie believes that the potential exists today for radionic ideas to empower creative individuals to develop skills in working with Nature that achieve profound real world results.

Our recently published book, Outbreak! The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behavior by Hilary Evans and Robert Bartholomew, is the Fortean Times (Issue 253) cover story for September 2009: “Panic! Strange Tales of Mass Hysteria.” The story is written by Bob Rickard, who concludes that this book “will undoubtedly remain the definitive reference work on collective delusions, mass panics and other strange forms of group behaviour for the foreseeable future. We could not ask for two more qualified guides [as Evans and Bartholomew].” Be sure to pick up a copy on the newsstands. Previously, co-author Robert Bartholomew was featured in an interview in USA Today, “Don’t panic! It’s just an outbreak.” This story was then picked up by ABC News Online. The book was also mentioned in a front page story on the New York Times: “Chinese Workers Say Illness Is Real, Not Hysteria.” Finally, Peter Rogerson, pretty much raved about the book on the Magonia blog, saying: “This is a huge achievement for a small publisher such as Anomalist [Books] and marks a completely new level of publishing for them.”