COLLISIONS WITH REALITY by John Macklin

It's time for another round of maybe-fiction "true" stories from John Macklin! The first chapter is a good start, with a mysterious memorial to a dead Luftwaffe pilot in the UK. Things get even better with the ugly ghost of Hoddeston, showcasing Macklin's relative subtlety in a field awash with the likes of Brad Steiger and Robert Tralins. We also get some treatments of relatively true tales like French UFO occupant sightings, Rasputin, and the Wilkins-Sherman ESP tests.

One chapter, "The Cave Monsters of Galloway," is an obvious fictionalization of the legend of Sawney Bean, with the cannibal patriarch renamed Cashel Logan. Bean's apocryphal cannibal clan have been used for horror thrills by L.A. Morse as The Flesheaters and Guy N. Smith as, well, Cannibals.

Another chapter, "The Man Who Was Murdered by Light," is taken from a bogus news item about German soldiers buried alive and living for years underground before being released. From The Madera Tribune, June 18th, 1951:

Macklin names one of the soldiers Kurt Holz and says he immediately dies of a heart attack upon exposure to sunlight after his rescue! Wild, John, wild! For more real world thrills, psychic bullshitter Gerard Croiset gets a promotional chapter, as does spontaneous human combustion and 1966 UFO sightings at the Wanaque reservoir. Kaspar Hauser and an Ica-inspired Brazilian pebble carving of a UFO round out some more Forteana in between more stories of "true" hauntings and supposed "case files" from Macklin's archive - now, remember, Macklin is a pseudonym, so how the heck does he have case files?

Speaking of Macklin's enthusiasm for trains, here he makes up a Welsh train disaster in 1927 that killed 16, at "Cynon Gap." Two boys on a cycling tour in 1956 see a spectral reenactment of the crash during a storm, and signalman Joshua Thomas laughing maniacally. The chapter is titled "Witness to a Train Disaster - 18 Years Afterwards" which is truly some kind of collision with reality if you do the math.

The final chapter is another Fortean classic, the missing Eskimo village of Lake Angikuni. Researcher Garth Haslam at the Anomaly Info site has outlined the history of this story, which was popularized by Frank Edwards in Stranger Than Science. Oddly, Macklin uses the "Angikuni" spelling, whereas Edwards wrote it as "Lake Anjikuni" - both are listed as variants online, while Haslam calls Anjikuni a misspelling, but either way it means that Macklin made a deliberate decision to spell it that way even though it's most likely he got the story from Edwards in the first place!

If your appetite's been whetted for more spooky true stories, Ace provides some ads for more Macklin madness, a whole page of Hans Holzer titles, Michael Hervey's Strange Happenings, plus a Steiger book on reincarnation. 

Macklin's Collisions With Reality is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Ace Books, 1969

MYSTERIES OF OUR WORLD by Peter Briggs

Not a mystery mongering text, but a solid pop-sci volume covering the cutting edge in earth science c.1969. Author Peter Briggs lays out the debates and scientific developments leading to our new knowledge of the world around us, from the ocean depths to the mountain tops, atmospheric heights, and beyond! There's a healthy dose of natural disasters, with volcanos and earthquakes making for engaging reading. Oceanic investigation is another exciting subject, with plenty of ships dredging and scanning and netting all around the seven seas - the Glomar Challenger is here, a few years before the Explorer would launch its now infamous secret mission. 

Reading on through Briggs' explorations, dense but smoothly flowing, it makes me think. We only just saw the announcement of the phasing out of "pocket" paperbacks, and here's a relic of that soon-to-be-bygone age: a portable, dependable, entertaining science primer, readable by anyone, anytime, anywhere, packed with references and sources - put out by a relatively sleazy/lowbrow publisher, even. Nowadays google is just as likely to give you a completely hallucinated "AI summary" for your search terms as a straightforward URL ... maybe I'm just being cranky, I don't know! Google also doesn't offer as many cigarette ads as vintage paperbacks:

Briggs appears to have been a prolific nonfiction writer - here's a spread of titles including Water, The Vital Essence, which Briggs references in this current text, and a title on the Glomar Challenger.

"And if California falls into the ocean/
Like the mystics and statistics say it will"

 

True to their rough and tumble image, Belmont Tower included a two page spread of mafia books as part of their nonfiction advertising. "You liked reading about volcanos, Billy? Well how about Lucky Luciano?"

This educational title is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Belmont Tower Books, 1969

A LOOK THROUGH SECRET DOORS by John Macklin

Join the "internationally recognized expert in psychic phenomenon" John Macklin for thirty chapters of true terror, sure to leave your head spinning and your soul caught between this world and the next!

The very first chapter on "The Haunted Fish Tank" is a total drip (ha!), but the next story about "The Woman Who Was Haunted by Owls" is a nasty good time, too much fun for me to spoil even. Right away we get the idea: these "true tales" are all supposed case files from Macklin's psychic investigations which likely have no earthly basis, and instead function as that classic form of maybe-fiction, presenting melodramatic ghost stories with the framing of Dr. So-and-so and Mr. Credible-witness telling Macklin about this or that horrible specter or awful incident, and Macklin trying to deny to the last that these unbelievable accounts just might be true ...

Macklin sprinkles in some Fortean frequent fliers like the Joyita, Foo Fighters, and Ogopogo to break up the maybe-fiction meatloaf, but it's not really needed, as his writing is much higher quality than (for example) Brad Steiger's similar volume of "true (fake) tales" Possession.

Another classic case Macklin covers is the Filipino "fangs of the invisible monster," and going by Garth Haslam's research, Macklin borrowed his version wholesale from Frank Edwards' telling - Macklin copies Edwards' incorrect dating of 1951 (actually 1953) and the misspelling of victim Clarita Villanueva's name as "Villaneuva." Steiger liked this story too. Another repeater: moving coffins in Estonia, which Peter Robson also covered in his Dialogue With The Dead.

As noted previously, cryptozoologist Karl Shuker traced John Macklin as a pseudonym belonging to one working writer "Tony James" ... whoever he was, he was sure one mean ghostly writing machine, as the back page adverts attest! Further confirmation for the James identification comes from this issue of the Association TransCommunication News Journal, which reprints an article credited to John Macklin/Tony James:

If you're looking for spooky ghost stories mixed with seasoned Forteana, you could do a lot worse than Macklin. Ace Books also did a nice job with the cheap but effective abstract cover art.

This title is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Ace Books, 1969