In the late ’70s and afterwards, UFOs hit the big time in pop culture with countless books about abduction experiences, major Hollywood motion pictures, and quickie B-movie documentaries. But before this turn into widespread exposure, ufology was largely a field defined by tightly-circulated, sometimes even self-published, written and photographic evidence…
The itinerant fun fairs that stalked the British Isles, descending at regular intervals upon some desolate local field like shoddy Fortean dream cities, were once a major part of the informal national calendar. As a child growing up in the hinterland of the world’s most beautiful town—the gleaming futurist metropolis known as Doncaster, South Yorkshire—I was lucky enough to live near a fuck-off massive one…
Devoted to investigating the paranormal and the supernatural, the debut issue of Mexican weekly magazine Duda—“doubt” or “question”—was released in March 1971. It would prove to be a popular and influential publication, and a surprisingly long-lived success for its Mexico City publisher Editorial Posada…
I’m finding it oddly difficult to write about UFOs Are Real, a low-budget UFO documentary from 1979. Not because there’s not a lot to say about it, but instead, thanks to the outsized role it played in my formative years, there’s ultimately far too much…
In his series of “Peter Ward” novels, published by various paperback houses (Signet, Dell, and Fawcett) between 1965 and 1971, Hunt conjures an agent with a pedigree strikingly similar to his own: Ivy League-educated (at Brown), possessing both a mysterious past involving disastrous CIA ops gone wrong and a burning desire to see himself accepted by the clandestine Washington D.C. power structure…
By Daniel Cecil
Once people believe something, they want to keep believing it, even if they are presented with incontrovertible evidence that their belief is incorrect. In fact, being confronted with contradictory evidence can make them want to express their questionable belief with even more conviction. In our current perpetually appalling discourse…
In 1979, a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel named Jim Channon completed a manual for a proposed new kind of armed forces division: one impelled by a mission of peace and manned by a new kind of soldier. Channon spent two years in the aftermath of the Vietnam War gathering information about the burgeoning late-’70s human potential movement…
By Tom G. Wolf
For the children of Westall High School in Victoria’s Clayton South, there was no indication that the day of April 6, 1966 would be among the most remarkable of their lives. Around 11:00 am, a group of students was returning to class from a sports lesson at the school oval when a number of them…
Last week, a story came across the We Are The Mutants news desk that inspired equal parts hope and dread: a reboot of the classic paranormal documentary series In Search of… is in the works, appropriately hosted by 21st century’s Mr. Spock, Zachary Quinto. I like Quinto well enough, and appreciate the sentiment of trying to resurrect probably one of the most important television shows from my youth. But of course I’m extremely skeptical about how well it will recreate the oddball outsider art aesthetic of the original series…
Hundreds of books on various psychic phenomena—both surveys and how-to manuals, sometimes both—were released throughout the 1960s, as the paranormal, especially ESP, began to be taken seriously by academics and the American and Soviet intelligence communities. What makes Sixth Sense notable, apart from a convincing cover illustration, is that it’s essentially a kid’s book…
