Scalping the Skeptics

"The Pelican"
from Magonia 82, August, 2003

The Pelican does not like being described as a sceptic. This is because so many people who call themselves sceptics simply cannot confine their criticisms to matters which they understand, usually the hard sciences, such as physics, astronomy or biology. They persist in blathering on about matters of which they evidently know very little with the result that, instead of recruiting people to the cause of logic and honest scientific research, they merely succeed in arousing hostility, and for no good reason.

The Raefield Affair

Matt Graeber
Magonia 82, August 2003

In Magonia 78 Matt Graeber discussed a `down-to-earth’ variety of UFO experience that he called `a dynamic display’. Graeber believes that such displays are “unique symbolic dramatisations” of the observer’s personal life status at the time of their UFO encounter; and that the UFO event seems to reflect both the ‘situational’ and `confrontational’ character of the witness’s problems. In this case study he takes another look at a dynamic display (or UFO ‘self perception) that took place on a busy highway in broad daylight.

Cook’s Tour: A Trip Down the Mean Streets of Ufology

Curtis Peebles
Magonia 82, August 2003.

It was a hot day in the late summer of 2002. I was in a bookstore in Palmdale and saw a copy of Nick Cook’s The Hunt for Zero Point. (1] As I read Cook’s story of secret anti-gravity technology, Nazi flying saucers, Black airplanes, shadowy sources, and sinister cover-ups, all told in a breathless first-person account, I realized that ufology had returned to its roots. Not simply the technological nuts and bolts of the 1950s, but back to the books of Donald Keyhoe and their atmosphere of ’saucer-noir.’

Schismatrix: Reflections on the Cult of Information in Film and Beyond

David Sivier

Magonia 82, August 2003

Undoubtedly the biggest cinematic event of the past few months or so has been the Matrix Reloaded. Forming the middle act in a trilogy between the earlier Matrix and the Matrix Revolution, due to be released this autumn, the film has already generated more than its fair share of media hype and academic speculation, including one paper by Mercer Schuchardt, which claimed that it is a new religious parable for the information age.