Anomaly Archives founder, SMiles Lewis, will be the guest of Ben & Joe on their UFO Garage Podcast, for THURSTY THURSDAY, March 10th @8:pm CST. Joe & Ben are donating 20% of their merch sales for this quarter to the Anomaly Archives, 501c3 nonprofit:
“Doing our part: Every quarter we donate 20% of all merch sales towards a UFO Research or Experiencer Support Group.
This quarter we chose to help out Anomaly Archives in Austin Texas find it’s new home!“
You may recall that they posted a video of the tour I gave them of the Anomaly Archives previous location, in February of 2020, just before the pandemic lockdowns changed everything…
Opening of the Archives of the Impossible @RiceUniversity March 3-6, 2022
Greetings Friends and Supporters of the Anomaly Archives!
It’s been nearly 6 months since our last eNews installment. I apologize for this long delay but, as with many folks during this pandemic, it’s been a tremendously difficult time for me (SMiles Lewis) in my personal life, in my day-job life, and of course, with my life’s-work, my passion-project, these Anomaly Archives. The loss of loved ones and the (hopefully temporary) loss of ground towards one’s most-loved endeavors is an ongoing source of grief and challenge for me and the Anomaly Archives board of directors and its volunteers. While there has been no change in the hiatus status of the Anomaly Archives collections laying in storage in South Austin, the long-awaited grand opening of another Texas-based anomalous archive is finally happening!
I’m proud and excited to be a panelist representing the independent nonprofit Anomaly Archives as part of the public opening of this important new anomalous archive at Rice University. Follow the links and information below to find out more about this Tuesday’s zoom session that is the first in a free series of preparatory webinars setting the stage for the March 3rd through 6th, grand opening event.
I probably first learned of the Archives of the Impossible at Rice University in late 2018 or early 2019. It was incredibly exciting to discover its existence, piecemeal, before any overt public announcement. I think I first found information about it while searching the PCHP (Preserving the Historical Collections of Parapsychology) directory and noticing the entry for Rice University. At that point I think it was still being referred to as the “GEM Archives” because of its Gnosticism, Esotericism, and Mysticism (GEM) certificate program connection. Soon thereafter I heard Diana Walsh Pasulka alluding to the formation of the archive in an interview she did on Podcast UFO. Within a year of learning about the new Rice University / Fondren Library special collection, and piecing together part of its origin story, I was invited to participate. It may have taken two years since first getting wind of its existence but in a month’s time I’ll finally get to visit it in person AND be a part of its opening events!
“We may be witnessing a new renaissance in anomalistic / para oriented public events. While rumors swirl about the activities and identities of anonymous “Invisible College” UFO researchers recently re-described in Dr. Diana Pasulka’s book American Cosmic, public organizations such as the Archives of the Impossible (formerly the GEM Archives [Gnosticism, Esotericism, and Mysticism]) at Rice University, Houston (within the Fondren Library’s Woodson Research Center – special collections) … We’ve also seen the recent … shift towards more scientific and academically accepted public events. Meanwhile, the more traditional, folksy festival type events continue to flourish and grow across the country.”
IMAGE: Anne & Whitley Strieber Collection 1970-2016 at the Archives of the Impossible, Rice University.
Later that year in our October 24th, 2019 edition of the eNewsletter – as we edged towards the great unknown awaiting us in the pandemic future of 2020 – we linked to the announcement of the opening Jeff Kripal’s, Opening of the Archives of the Impossible at Rice University, to launch in late October, early November of 2020:
[Grand Opening Originally Scheduled for Oct 29 – Nov 1, 2020]
We are delighted and honored to have been invited to be a panel participant at this unique event celebrating the opening of this important and unique archive. The 3 upcoming free webinars coming up this Tuesday the 8th, then the following Tuesday the 15th, and another on Thursday the 24th (see below for details) make the next 3 weeks in February of 2022 into an amazing lead in to this grand opening event for Jeff Kripal’s and Rice University’s Archives-Of-The-Impossible!
We hope you all will show your interest and support for this amazing event. It is an important milestone along the journey of creating a more respectable foundation for the exploration of these strange surrealities found within the raw living experiencing of folklore and myth which make up the storyline of humanity’s long-term contact with seemingly Alien Others.
Below in the rest of this long-overdue eNews installment is part of the introductory message from Professor Kripal that you can see at the official ImpossibleArchives.Rice.Edu website (where you can also see the event schedule and register for all of the events) along with the list of Plenary Speakers as well as links to the upcoming Pre-Event Webinars to prime your psychic pump for the main event.
After that you’ll find the usual long list of latest Anomaly News Headlines that we post to our Flipboard Magazine, as well as link to the interview with did with Professor Jeffrey Kripal for the 2020 Streamathon Emergency Fundraiser.
Jeffrey Kripal Welcomes You To The Archives Of The Impossible
“The intellectual gravity of the gifts of Vallée, Strieber, and May created a kind of “black hole” effect among those who knew. Soon, others were attracted by their gravitational pull and approached us with their own offers of generosity. These individuals included Brenda Denzler and Diana Pasulka, two scholars of religion with extensive ethnographic and interviewing experience with contactees; Robert Fuller, an accomplished psychologist of religion whose father had collected almost every issue of Fate magazine, whose wonderful early pulp fiction covers and real-life stories has functioned since 1948 as a kind of Reader’s Digest of the American paranormal; Richard Haines, a long-time NASA scientist, aviation expert, and author of CE-5: Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind, with a very considerable trove of scientific research on UFO sightings; Larry Bryant, an employee of the Pentagon who spent much of his life collecting ufological materials and engaging in activist and legal work around the Freedom of Information Act and disclosure movement (Larry and his daughter sent us 102 boxes); and Stewart Alexander, a leading physical medium from the UK who has been working for over forty years and manifesting various extraordinary abilities and physical phenomena.
At present, we estimate that the total archival collection stands at somewhere well north of 100,000 items, and that this is probably much too modest of a figure. We are professionally archiving the material as fast as we can, with significant help from Ph.D. students and the professional staff of Woodson Research Center. When complete, these Archives of the Impossible will easily constitute one of the largest collections of its kind in the world and almost certainly the largest at an American research university. We look forward to the days when we can welcome researchers and students from around the world into these boxes, folders, and files. The truth may or may not be out there, as one popular American television series had it, but it is almost certainly in here, somewhere. Please come and help us find it.”
– Jeffrey J. Kripal
This is one event you don’t want to miss, so register today
Jeffrey J. Kripal is the Associate Dean of the Faculty and Graduate Programs in the School of the Humanities and the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. He is also the Associate Director of the Center for Theory and Research at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. His new book will come out this spring, entitled The Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities (Chicago, 2022), where he intuits an emerging new order of knowledge that can engage in robust moral criticism but also affirm the superhuman or nonhuman dimensions of our histories, cultures, and futures. His full body of work can be seen at http://jeffreyjkripal.com
Jacques F. Vallée, PhD, is the founder of Documatica Research, LLC, San Francisco, California. An information scientist with a background in astrophysics and AI, he served as one of the architects of social networking on the early Internet, and as a founder of five international venture capital funds in Silicon Valley, including NASA’s Red Planet Capital. Jacques’ early interest in the UFO phenomenon and psychical research led to a series of books and technical papers in many languages. Most recently, he developed the largest extant UAP “data warehouse” for a classified project.
Leslie Kean is an independent investigative journalist who has been bringing credible information about hidden, paranormal and “impossible” realities into the mainstream for over twenty years. She is the author of Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife and UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record, a New York Times bestseller. Kean co-wrote the pivotal December 2017 New York Times story which revealed the existence of a secret Pentagon UFO program and included the release of now-famous Navy videos. Surviving Death is the basis for a 2021 six-part documentary series on Netflix. Kean is now working on a documentary series on UFOs for CNN. https://www.lesliekean.com/
Whitley Strieber is the author of Communion, the best selling book about close encounters in history, and many follow up books. His latest works are the Afterlife Revolution, about the mysterious possibility of extra-physical consciousness, A New World, covering his recent experiences with the phenomenon he calls “the visitors,” and the latest discoveries about the ambiguous experience of contact, and Jesus: A New Vision, a reconstruction of the life and teachings of Jesus. His website is Unknowncountry.com, which hosts his podcast, Dreamland. The site has been in operation since 2000, and the podcast has been broadcast weekly since 1998. Whitley lives in California.
Diana Pasulka is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Her research spans Catholic history to new religious movements. Recent books include American Cosmic: Religion, UFOs, and Technology (OUP 2019) and Contact 21: Encounters with Non-Human Intelligence (forthcoming). She has published in Tank, Vox, Vice, and has been invited to speak at numerous institutions and venues, including the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, keynotes at universities, and international public radio. She is lead investigator on an ongoing study of Catholic manuscripts and saints at the Vatican Secret Archive and the Vatican Space Observatory.
John Phillip Santos is a Rhodes Scholar, writer, journalist, and documentarian. In addition to television documentaries on religion and culture for CBS News and PBS, myriad magazine articles and newspaper work, he has authored two memoirs, Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (1999 National Book Award Finalist), The Farthest Home is in An Empire of Fire (2010), and a book of poems, Songs Older Than Any Known Singer (2007). He teaches Writing and Mestizo Cultural Studies in the Honors College at University of Texas San Antonio. He is currently working on the last installment in his trilogy of memoirs, and collaborating with Chicano rocker Alejandro Escovedo on a “mythic” memoir of the musician’s storied life in punk rock and beyond.
Edwin C. May, PhD, is the president and founder of the Laboratories for Fundamental Research, Palo Alto, California. Formerly, he was a scientist with the U.S. Government’s secret ESP program popularly known as Star Gate from 1976-1995, and was the director of that program from 1985 to 1995. He is the author of several articles in the nuclear physics literature, many papers in the technical journals of parapsychology, and over 300 technical final reports on ESP to the government. He received his doctorate in experimental nuclear physics from the University of Pittsburgh in 1968.
Sebastiano De Filippi (B.A., M.A., Ph.D. candidate) is an Italian-Argentinian musician, author and scholar. He studied social sciences at the Buenos Aires and Argentine Catholic universities. He is Music Director of the National Congress Chamber Orchestra and Artistic Director of the Latin-American Orchestra Conducting Academy. As a researcher of fringe phenomena he has 25 years of experience. He is the author of a hundred papers and articles. His UFO-related books are The City of the BlueFlame, The Lords of Uritorco and Project Erks, published in Argentina, Chile, Spain and Italy; The Other Toscanini was published in the United States.
Webinars
In the weeks leading up to our conference at Rice, Jeffrey Kripal will be holding a series of live webinar conversations with leading scholars in the field. These conversations will push the academic study of the paranormal in new directions while they set the tone for the conference to come.
You can register for these webinars and learn more about the speakers here:
John Phillip Santos is a Rhodes Scholar, writer, journalist, and documentarian. In addition to television documentaries on religion and culture for CBS News and PBS, myriad magazine articles and newspaper work, he has authored two memoirs, Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (1999 National Book Award Finalist), The Farthest Home is in An Empire of Fire (2010), and a book of poems, Songs Older Than Any Known Singer (2007). He teaches Writing and Mestizo Cultural Studies in the Honors College at University of Texas San Antonio. He is currently working on the last installment in his trilogy of memoirs, and collaborating with Chicano rocker Alejandro Escovedo on a “mythic” memoir of the musician’s storied life in punk rock and beyond.
Priscilla Wald is R. Florence Brinkley Distinguished Chair of English at Duke University, where she co-edits American Literature with Matthew Taylor. She is the author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Duke, 2008) and Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Duke, 1995). Wald is currently working on a monograph entitled Human Being After Genocide, which considers the “mythistory” of humanity that emerged from efforts to articulate an “underlying spirit of unity” that could sacralize “the human” in the wake of two world wars and a proliferation of scientific and technological developments that challenged conventional notions of life.
Hussein Ali Agrama is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. His previous research and writing focused on religion and secularism in the Islamic Middle East. A central current of his ongoing research explores how the UFO phenomenon and the anomalies associated with it may profoundly challenge the secular foundations of the contemporary social and humanistic sciences, a recent example of which can be found here.
[NOTE: Inclusion of news & event info is purely informational
and does not indicate endorsement.]
Jeff Kripal Discusses Anomalous Archives with SMiles Lewis as part of the Anomaly Archives’ Streamathon-2020 emergency fundraiser series. Alt-version: Anomaly Archives
Saturday Streamathon Fundraiser Series 5.4 Jeff Kripal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1KFz…“Archives of the Impossible” [Formerly the GEM Archives: Gnosticism, Esotericism, and Mysticism] – Rice University, Houston, Texas http://libguides.rice.edu/paranormalArchives of the Impossible at Fondren Library’s Woodson Research Center (special collections) From the certificate program within the Religious Studies department of Rice University, founded by the efforts of Jeff Kripal.Main Collections:
Jacques F. Vallee –UFOlogist, computer scientist, venture capitalist.
Whitley Strieber – author of the Communion books detailing his abduction experiences, and his wife and co-author, Anne Strieber.
Edwin May – research director at Pentagon’s Star Gate project that focused on ESP research.
Richard Haines – founder of National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP).
Brenda Denzler – anthropologist and scholar of the paranormal (books and some archival materials).
Jeffrey Kripal Academic Papers, 1970-2015 A full run of Fate magazine.
The Anomaly Archives is a Proud Sponsor of the Austin Archives Bazaar and hopes local Austin artists will take advantage of the Bazaar’s new ARCHIVES-IN-ART CONTEST!
AND, we hope our Austin arts community will consider using the Anomaly Archives collections for its inspiration. We’ve got thousands of weird rare paranormal books, magazines, posters, cultural ephemera and more, covering a wealth of topics that might inspire your next art piece. So contact us about visiting the Anomaly Archives to find your muse! Our weekly hours are Thursdays and Saturdays from 2-6pm. Contact us via phone (512) 842-9046 or EMAIL.
The Austin Archives Bazaar is excited to announce its inaugural exhibition: Archives in Art, a juried art show that encourages Central Texas artists to use or be inspired by archival materials in creating their work. There are no submission fees, and accepted works will be exhibited at the Austin Archives Bazaar on April 19, 2020 and afterwards at Austin Central Library’s 4th Floor from April 27 – June 30. Central Library will be a stop on the WEST Austin Studio Tour in May! There will be cash awards for the jury’s choice and people’s choice winners.
Artists are encouraged to visit a local archival repository in person OR online and select an archival collection or item to interpret as a 2D visual creative work. The artist’s work can pay homage to historical events or figures, fuel discussion, or examine current events through a historical lens. Topics to consider include (but are not limited to): climate change, cultural celebrations, faith, family history, gentrification, human rights, identity, immigration, and incarceration.
Artists may transform and reconfigure copies of archival material, while being mindful of Fair Use Copyright Law. Sources used MUST be cited. See copyright.gov/fair-use/more-info.html for more information.”
Visit the Austin Archives Bazaar‘s “Archives in Art” webpage for more information about the Cash Awards, Jurors, Entry Deadlines, Entry Form, and MORE!
Check out this other important information from their webpage:
ABOUT AUSTIN ARCHIVES BAZAAR
Austin Archives Bazaar is a FREE biennial event organized by the Archivists of Central Texas since 2014. Austin Archives Bazaar 2020 will take place at Trinity Hall, 311 E. 5th Street, on April 19, 2020. Visitors will have the opportunity to chat with over 20 local archival repositories who table at the event, hear speakers share stories about their discoveries with archives, learn best preservation practices, win door prizes, and more!
THINGS TO KNOW BEFORE VISITING AN ARCHIVAL REPOSITORY
For most repositories, a list of their policies and procedures will be available online in some form. Spend time looking over the archives’ website before your visit. Look for a “Plan Your Visit” link which will prepare you for what to expect, including registration steps and what items are prohibited from the reading room. Many archives have locker systems available to store items, but it’s not a bad idea to travel light.
Be mindful of photography restrictions. Many archives allow the use of cameras, laptops and other personal digital devices, but restrictions may exist.
Handle all materials carefully and keep the materials in order.
Be prepared to pay for photocopies.
Once you find materials to work with, talk to an archivist about how you will be using the item(s) so they can clarify any restrictions on use or copyright violations.
It was hard to miss the ads for Arcturus Books in the early days, when I took my first steps into the pool of ufology. Overwhelmed with information as I was, I never thought to contact them or get a copy of their catalogue: magazines, ‘zines, newsletters and bulletin board postings (remember the long-gone days of BBS?) provided a dizzying mix of information where abduction claims, tales of underground bases and straight-out conspiracy theory shared the cramped pages like passengers on a subway train during rush hour.
It was much later that Joan Jeffers – a devoted Pennsylvanian researcher of UFO and related phenomena – told me to get a hold of Bob Girard, saying he could find any book or periodical I might remember from the early days of sauceriana, or even material from other countries. Oddly enough, I was sort of in touch with Bob already. His former partner, the late Ron Bonds, had set up Illuminet Press expressing an interest in publishing my translation of Salvador Freixedo’s “Visionaries, mystics and contactees”, a great introduction to the Spanish Jesuit’s vast body of work on the paranormal. Bob’s wife Monica provided the cover art for the project, so when I picked up the phone to call Arcturus, no introduction was really necessary.
I spoke for hours with Bob that first time. What I’d been told was true – he knew all the corners, light and dark, of the paranormal community, current and past – and an encyclopedic recollection of old books. We spoke at length about his own work, “Futureman”, a dystopic view on the ultimate fate of humankind if the age of abductions proved true. Disturbing reading, but written in a most insightful style.
So it was that Bob helped me rebuild my collection of UFO books, which had been lost over the course of years, some lost over the course of international moves and others forsaken as new interests commanded my attention. Getting into “new” materials was never difficult thanks to Bob’s reviews, which made the Arcturus Books catalogue a joy to read – probably more so than a number of newsstand offerings available at the moment! Some descriptions are etched in my mind, like an old samizdat whose cover “depicted a hayseed peeing into a pond with a flying saucer hovering overhead” – I’m paraphrasing here, but I still smile at the laughter the description caused in me at the time.
Some reviews were at the other end of the spectrum: scathing indictments of the subject matter and sometimes the author. Words that could either make you want to order the book to see if such an assessment was warranted, or enough to make one turn the page and hope for better.
1993 saw the birth of my first newsletter on “UFOs in Latin America and Spain” and Bob Girard was pleased to add it to Arcturus’s offerings, cautioning me not to charge too much for it, since “mystics never have any money”. The price point must’ve been right, as SAMIZDAT (as it was called) became a strong seller for Arcturus over a time frame of five years. When I announced that I the little newsletter was folding (its news stories rendered stale by the Internet), I told him I intended to come back with a new idea. “Whatever you do, make sure it’s good!” he said, and INEXPLICATA came out within months, available in print format for many years before the same situation – the immediacy offered by electronic sources – forced it to migrate to the web, where it has remained since 2003.
We didn’t see eye to eye on everything, though. The Chupacabras Diaries, my initial offering on Puerto Rico’s paranormal predator, didn’t really meet his approval. Bob thought the correct approach to take should have been a dismissive one. He particularly disliked a chapter bearing the title “It’s In the Trees- It’s Coming!” – a homage to Jacques Torneur’s The Night of the Demon (1957). Now you’re part of the problem, I believe he said. However, he gladly accepted my self-published copies of TCD and sold them through Arcturus to a world that was only just starting to hear about the creature’s exploits, way before it became a media phenomenon.
When people ask me where I obtained my knowledge of book publishing, having never worked in the industry, I always say it was thanks to those long telephone sessions with Bob Girard. The ins and outs of the publishing world were as familiar to him as the dark corridors of the paranormal. A good and knowledgeable friend who richly deserves to be remembered as a 20th century Renaissance man.
How a group of radical conservatives ousted John Boehner—and pushed Congress to the right.
One of the working titles for the group was the Reasonable Nutjob Caucus. Credit Illustration by Matt Chase
“I used to spend ninety per cent of my constituent response time on people who call, e-mail, or send a letter, such as, ‘I really like this bill, H.R. 123,’ and they really believe in it because they heard about it through one of the groups that they belong to, but their view was based on actual legislation,” Nunes said. “Ten per cent were about ‘Chemtrails from airplanes are poisoning me’ to every other conspiracy theory that’s out there. And that has essentially flipped on its head.” The overwhelming majority of his constituent mail is now about the far-out ideas, and only a small portion is “based on something that is mostly true.” He added, “It’s dramatically changed politics and politicians, and what they’re doing.”
Wednesday, October 22, 2014 By Kathryn Lucariello, CCNhi@cox-internet.com
Delores Cannon
EUREKA SPRINGS — Dolores Cannon of Hunstville, who took over managing the annual Eureka Springs UFO Conference, passed away Oct. 18 after a short illness following an accident in late September. She was 83.
Cannon was born in 1931 in St. Louis, Mo.
She married Johnny, a career Navy man, in 1951.
Cannon was most known for her work as a hypnotherapist who began practicing in the 1960s, and a past-life regressionist since 1979. Stating that she had established contact with Michel de Notredame, known popularly as Nostradamus, in 1989 she published a three-volume set titled “Conversations with Nostradamus,” which contains 1,000 prophecies and their interpretation.
She was also a UFO investigator in the last 20 years of her life, and she began teaching her specific hypnosis skills from a technique called Quantum Healing Hypnosis Therapy to help clients experience instantaneous healing of diseases. It was this work which also led to her past life regression work.
Cannon eventually began speaking and teaching all over the world, appearing at conferences and on radio shows such as “Coast to Coast.”
Cannon was the author of 18 books on various metaphysical subjects, published by her own label, Ozark Mountain Publishing, which has also published the work of more than 50 other authors.
She took over the Eureka Springs UFO Conference in 2013, after a gap following the death of longtime conference organizer Lucius Farish, and established the Lucius Farish Trust award of $1,000. During this year’s conference, in its 27th year, Cannon added two film debuts and said she hoped to offer more in the future.
Some local residents remember Cannon participating in weekly metaphysical groups in Eureka Springs in the 1980s, and several shared memories of her on her Facebook page.
Pam Quick remembers Cannon coming to the meetings, which resulted in a several-year friendship.
“When Dolores was working on a project, there was no stopping her!” Quick wrote. “She told us back then that she would be speaking worldwide, that she would be on many television shows, and that many books would follow. All of those things, and much more, came to be.”
“Dolores was a true inspiration, always very positive about the future,” wrote Barbara Kellogg. “I feel very lucky to have known her back in those early days. Many lifelong friendships were made at those weekly meetings…. Dolores Cannon was a one of a kind true force of nature, and all I can say to whoever and whatever is out there on the other side, watch out!”
A few years ago someone asked me if I’d ever heard any weird stories about the Dewitt C. Greer building downtown. They proceeded to tell me they had heard tales of folks seeing blood-smeared walls and other strange haunting phenomena on certain floors within specific rooms.
Recently, as I was working on archiving paper files and periodicals held by the Anomaly Archives, I came across the October 2003 issue (Volume 29, Number 2) of TxDoT’s Transportation News magazine whose cover shouts:
GHOSTS. . . Discovered in the Greer Building !!
The Ghosts of Greer by Mike Cox / Editor
If Harvey Hubert hadn’t fatally stabbed that young Austin man on Halloween night in 1916, he might have lived to see the fine new Highway Department building go up where the Travis County Jail once stood.
But that’s not how it worked out. At 1:50 p.m. on Aug. 23, 1918, Sheriff George Matthews sprang the trap on the gallows inside the jail and Hubert paid for his crime at the end of a rope.
Hubert, 34, had the distinction of being the last of nine men legally hanged in the castle-like stone jail, built for $100,000 in 1876 at the corner of 11th and Brazos streets — present location of the Dewitt C. Greer Building.
Who knows? Maybe Hubert’s spirit has something to do with the mysterious footsteps and strange noises some TxDOT employees have reported hearing at night in the big meeting room and on the eighth floor when the building’s supposedly empty.
But for anyone who believes in ghosts, there are plenty of suspects.
This edition of Transportation News is also archived online here:
SynchroMystic-911: Deep ParaPolitics & Esoteric-Occult High-Strangeness Surrounding September 11th by SMiles Lewis
A Post-Modern Audio/Video Exploration of Pop-Culture, Through A Jungian-Synchronicity-Lens … Darkly
A brief 911 presentation facilitated by a series of short videos, followed by open discussion on 911 and our general meeting afterwards.
Presented at the Anomaly Archives monthly public meeting, Saturday, September 26th, 2015, from 1-4 pm at INACS, located at 12593 Research Blvd., Suite 302 Austin, Texas 78759.
A Post-Modern Audio/Video Exploration of Pop-Culture, Through A Jungian-Synchronicity-Lens … Darkly
OVERVIEW:
Me & 911
911 Anomalies… & Counting
Best Parapolitical Info & Attempts at Justice
Fortean Name Game & the Origins of SynchroMysticism
Where do we go from here?
Audio/ Video
9-11 Prediction from Saturday night live (@1.5 mins) Link / Link / Link
“My dream was to have one business in which the entire worlds literature on these subjects was all under one roof” – Bob Girard to Clas Svahn, April 19th 1987
Bob Girard. Photo Credit: Clas Svahn / AFU.
The following interview first appeared in the Winter 2015 Issue of
The Legacy of Bob Girard – An Interview with SMiles Lewis
About the Bob Girard Collection
We are proud to announce our latest acquisition: the personal collection of rare book seller and proprietor of the long-running Arcturus Books service, Robert C. Girard.
Explain who Bob Girard was, what he did and why he is remembered.
“He saw his Arcturus [Book Service] … as a way to connect to people, strange and wonderful people that he would never had been able to find without his book list.”
– Clas Svahn, Journalist and Vice Chairman of the Archives for the unexplained
“Bob Girard is an American institution”
– Colin Bennett, Fortean and flying saucer historian, 2004
“The Marcel Proust of the UFO phenomenon” … “The proprietor of Arcturus Books–arguably the biggest and best UFO bookstore in the world.”
– John Chambers, Paranormal journalist, 2004
“The greatest national bookseller of used books ranging from cryptozoology to Forteana, from ufology to parapsychology”
– Loren Coleman, Cryptozoologist, 2011
“Robert C. Girard… ran what was probably the world’s premier Fortean mail-order book service”
– Ronan Coghlan, Fortean zoologist, 2011
Bob Girard (1942-2011) was a legendary collector and seller of rare books, specializing in UFO literature and related fringe subject matter. In today’s age of internet ubiquity, instant gratification, and declining print media outlets, Robert Girard’s name is not widely known among UFO believers nor paranormal enthusiasts. His name is, however, remembered among many long-time UFO researchers, paranormal writers, and the DIY self-publishers of the 1980s and ’90s alt-media “Zine Scene.” He is remembered as the brutally frank bibliophile who published his incisive insights in concise micro-reviews, monthly, distributed world-wide across six continents. Despite his contribution of a handful of small books (The Revolt of the Free and Futureman to name only two) and over 30 years of service to the book-hungry global network of para-cultural knowledge seekers, he has yet to be acknowledged by the history books. Though in fact, he and his Arcturus Books service are mentioned in several UFO books including within the source citations of academic (and scholar of new religious movement studies) author James R. Lewis’ The Gods Have Landed.
Before becoming “the Marcel Proust of the UFO phenomenon” (John Chambers, 2004) Robert was an enlisted man in the United States Air Force, serving from 1964 to 1968 at Incirlik Air Force Base in Turkey and Wichita Falls, Texas, until he received an honorable discharge at the rank of sergeant. In 1978 he and his family moved to Ecuador where they lived for two years before returning home to Scotia, New York, where Robert had spent his high school and college years. It was there that he began pursuing his dream of starting his own rare book business with a niche focus on the most esoteric and Occult books within the UFO and paranormal milieus.
In 1980 he launched his book business with a monthly CataZine (combination catalog and magazine) featuring his own short reviews of every new book and zine that crossed his path. His no-nonsense reviews were infamous and for some it was a badge of honor to get even a bad review from Mr. Girard. Despite these gruff aspects of Bob’s character, his perspectives on these strange phenomena were considered as valuable as the rare books he was commenting upon.
“He was deeply knowledgeable of ufology and Forteana and wrote caustic reviews of most of the books he sold in his monthly or bimonthly Arcturus Books Catalogue, which he used to mail to his clients. His reviews were widely read because of their unique, no-holds-barred style. You knew Bob was an honest person in that he gave bad—sometimes awful—reviews to half the books he sold. He cared more for the integrity of the field than the almighty buck. … Bob Girard had a rough side to his personality and could be often rude with his own clients but… once you got accustomed to Bob’s gruffy side, you got to like him just the way he was.” (Huneeus, OpenMinds.tv, 2011)
From the ArcStarBooks website we have Bob’s own words from his very first catalog in June of 1980:
“…We don’t have to describe the thrills to be found in reading UFO literature; we feel sure that you already know many of them. We have noticed this, however, in our own 25 years plus interest in UFOs and their literature: that as one’s interest in UFOs deepens, one is led into other fascinating areas of study through the study of Ufolit. To adopt a truly panoramic understanding of flying saucers, one must study such allied areas as Astroarchaeology, Astronomy, History, Mythology, Parapsychology and Religion. Through Ufolit, one’s personal vision can expand in many ways, and the entire course of one’s life may be changed—for the better.” (ArcStarBooks.com, “Never Cease from Exploration…,” June 2013)
The Anomaly Archives recently received a donation of 80 boxes of approximately 1,300 titles from his widow, Monica A. Williams-Girard. Among the yet to be cataloged works are books covering topics ranging from UFOs to Atlantis, El Dorado to Ancient Astronauts, Ancient Britain, the Celts and Stonehenge, Pre-Columbian America to Ancient America, Lost Civilizations and Inner Earth Mythology, Alchemy and the Occult, Gnosticism and the Dead Sea Scrolls, Apocrypha and Hermetica, Crystal Skulls, Greek and Roman Classics, World History and the History of Christianity, Minerals and Gemstones, Radio to Railroads, to Hitler and the Nazis.
There are a number of rare editions of classic flying saucer contactee books, several autographed by their authors. Bob had a special interest in the Contactees and at one time came into possession of George Hunt Williamson’s personal files, most of which were later sold to researcher Michael Swords for archival preservation. Bob’s interest in the Contactees went so far that he published “a reproduction of fifties contactee Truman Bethurum’s own scrapbook” (Ignacio Darnaude). We’ve just scratched the surface of his donated collection and I’m very excited to catalog these invaluable pieces of Fortean / Ufological history.
Did you know Bob?
I didn’t know Bob personally but had interacted with him on a business level in the mid 1990s when I briefly published my own print zine which he sold through his service. My zine wouldn’t have reached as many people as it did if not for him. This is an important aspect of his relevance to the history of our search for knowledge about these strange phenomena: Bob Girard played a critical role in helping people worldwide connect with each other through his network of clients and his publicizing each of their individual localized efforts at Do-It-Yourself research and publishing.
Bob Girard reviewed, bought, and sold the many different esoteric self-published zines that were, in a sense, the precursors to the explosion of alternative media websites populating the internet in the late 1990s. These DIY zines were emerging from the handmade photocopier Samizdat screeds of the 1980s and becoming increasingly well-produced with the advent of easily accessible desktop publishing software. Zines like your own Steamshovel Press (which Bob said, “feed that dark feeling in the pit of your gut”), Wes Nations’ Crash Collusion, and so many others, helped propel these topics from the printed page into the internet age.
Scott Corrales of Inexplicata and the Institute of Hispanic Ufologysays that Bob helped him distribute his earliest books on the chupacabras and that his “encouragement made possible the distribution of our initial publication, Samizdat (1992-1998).” UFO and paranormal author and researcher Kenneth W. Behrendt says in one of his books (The New Science of the UFO) that he “was fortunate to obtain the help of” Bob’s book service which led him to publish his own quarterly UFO research journal called AURA (Annals of Ufological Research Advances) that was sold exclusively through Arcturus.
Within one of the few boxes of donated materials that I have unpacked I came across an 1986 issue of Critique (A Journal of Conspiracies & Metaphysics) in which the magazine’s publisher included a promotional sheet with a personal note stating, “how about an ad exchange … haven’t seen a catalog in a while” which provides a typical example of the kind of networking and supportiveness in which Bob frequently engaged.
The Arcturus Books “weirdness by mail” service, in my opinion, was a definite facilitator for the rise in popularity of UFO and paranormal websites as the world-wide-web became increasingly accessible. Unfortunately, Bob was either unable or unwilling to adapt quickly enough to the changing digital landscape to successfully transition from the snail-mail world to that of the monolithic online sales giants like Amazon; though he did try.
How did you come into possession of his archive?
Retired Naval Officer, former NSA employee, and 25-year MUFON board member Tom Deuley acted as both mediator and facilitator of this donation to the Anomaly Archives including his personally paying for the shipping costs of moving the 80 boxes from Port St. Lucie, Florida to Austin, Texas. The source of funding for the collection was arranged through the UFO Research Coalition which is made up of CUFOS (Center for UFO Studies), FUFOR (Fund for UFO Research), and MUFON (Mutual UFO Network). FUFOR arranged the funding for the URC and Tom hopes to have MUFON continue requesting funds for the upkeep of the collection.
The Girard Collection is the latest and greatest donation of a personal book collection acquired by the Anomaly Archives. Some of our past collection donations have included books and paper files of:
Central Texas Fortean journalist and publisher Dennis Stacy (past writer for OMNI Magazine and editor of the MUFON UFO Journal and publisher of Anomalist Books)
Austin counter-cultural zine publisher Wes Nations of Crash Collusion magazine (now at JohnnyVagabond.com)
Local political activist Mike Hanson (author of Bohemian Grove: Cult of Conspiracy who accompanied Alex Jones into the grove)
Occult UFO researcher John Carter (author of Sex & Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons)
… as well as the Founder of the San Antonio Parapsychological Association, a local respected past-life regression therapist, and many more.
We hope that other researchers, authors, and knowledge seekers will consider donating their personal collections of books and paper files to the Anomaly Archives. There are too many collections which have already been lost to the mists of time.
What are your plans to make it researcher accessible?
First we’ll be cataloging the donated collection and processing the materials for public access and display within the Anomaly Archives physical location in Northwest Austin, Texas. The resulting catalog and relevant finding aids will be posted on our website, www.AnomalyArchives.org for all to see.
We currently have very limited public hours of operation but all of his materials will be available soon to view in-house. Researchers interested in perusing this or any of our collections are encouraged to email us at <contact@anomalyarchives.org>
We are developing several different plans for how best to utilize his collection, with an appreciation of his perspectives on the UFO phenomenon, as public awareness tools. So much of what he was interested in touches upon the many popular memes found within the wide array of UFO related esoteric themes (Atlantis and other ancient human civilizations, theories about ancient astronauts and alien abductions, etc.) that we are certain people of all paranormal stripes will find import in his legacy.