FEEDING THE FLAME by T. Lobsang Rampa

The RAMPATHON continues! Up next is Rampa's big eleventh book: he says that thus far he's been lighting a candle in the darkness, and now's the time for FEEDING THE FLAME!

The point of this book, Rampa says, is to answer some questions from his dear and loyal readers. He also has plenty of stupid readers who waste his time with idiot letters, and he kvetches about these drooling morons for pages and pages ... what can he say, Rampa loves bitching and moaning! But anyways, to those dear and loyal readers who send in thoughtful queries, Rampa is ready to answer you!

"I hate you, the reader."

Would it surprise you that a lot of the answers are recycled from his last book? If you missed it last time: pets go to heaven, astral travel is possible, and Rampa absolutely unconditionally does NOT commune with any mediums charging fees for services. And when he departs this plane, Rampa assures us, he will NOT be taking any calls. He also addresses the specious text My Visit to Venus, assembled out of old Rampa articles by Gray Barker and presented by John Keel. Rampa does not approve!

Rampa's health is clearly on his mind. He spends much of this book in hospital, and is spared from the Angel of Death only by the astral appearance of his old friend, the Lama Mingyar Dondup, who tasks him with the writing of this book.

It's a hard life for ol' Rampa, living in shitty apartments in shitty towns like Halifax, having to listen to gibbering French Canadian patois outside and awful new British "music" on the radio, and, as he said, dealing with piles and piles of worthless letters from total dipshits. Rampa's not gonna tell you how to win the Irish Sweepstakes or make girls do what you want! He's here to answer the REAL questions, about real weighty subjects like life and death and the great beyond ...

Rampa's a grump, but at least he has his cats. The man loves writing on and on about his kitties, in that syrupy British style. Miss Cleo and Miss Tadalinka provide him much comfort, and again Rampa emphasizes that you'll meet your dear pets again on the other side.

Rampa and a friend. Courtesy David Michie.

Some new facts: Negroes are naturally rhythmic due to kharmic suffering, and homosexuals are to be pitied, NOT hated, for their mixed up souls! What a humanitarian! Rampa also dumps some atrocity tales on us about Chinese oppression in Tibet, and complains that the Dalai Lama doesn't want to team up with him for the cause! It's all the fault of the lying press, another Rampa bugbear. Soon now, by the way, there's going to be a big scandal where high ranking US officials will be exposed as Communist collaborators! It's a pity Rampa and John Pendragon never collaborated, they've both got the same slightly addled spirit as to predictions.

Rampa elaborates on the astral world, and the things you can get up to there after you leave your physical body in this life. You don't have to wear clothes or eat, but most people end up cladding themselves in some kind of thought-robes and taking sustenance from the ether. Details are also provided on the great astral Overself and its avatars - that's us! It's all part of the cosmic plan, as the Overself sends out feelers to explore and experience life, over and over again.

Rampa's wife Ra'ab does graphology for big firms, a neat detail that he works into a chapter on palmistry, clairvoyance, etc. He also burns some pages on the ol' Kennedy/Lincoln coincidences - Rampa's nothing if not longwinded and shameless about random padding.

Some more psychic potpourri: organ transplants are dangerous because of possible astral discontinuities between donor and recipient. Rampa says that artifical organs should be perfected as soon as possible! He also knows the truth about the lost submarines Thresher and Scorpion, but the story is too weird to be told right now. Rampa's also seen a genuine astral telephone, but the inventor was harassed by the press and Rampa himself is too broke to replicate the work. Ouija boards are not genuine conduits to spirit communication with the other side, but you can get yourself in trouble through self delusion or through trickery by lower astral forms imitating human spirits. These lower forms are harmless unless you allow yourself to be manipulated.

Rampa notes near the end of the book that he's deliberately answered questions in a "higgly piggly" order to prevent readers simply looking up the one or two specific answers they'd want. That's a nice excuse for the book being a disorganized ramble.

Some of the good readers thanked: Mr. and Mrs. "Yeti" Thompson, Mr. de Munnik, Mr. and Mrs. Hanns Czermak, and the Worstmann Ladies. And a big hand for the folks at home ... or maybe not, if you don't send return postage!

Like all of his work, Rampa's Feeding the Flame is available to read and download on the official website for T. Lobsang Rampa.

Corgi Books, 1975 (original pub. 1971)

THE UNDER-PEOPLE by Eric Norman

Still high on his NEW UFO BREAKTHROUGH from yesterday, Brad Steiger takes a spin under his pen name Eric Norman and delivers a rewrite of that same text, simply shifting the main focus from UFOs and Men in Black to the Hollow Earth and the startling discovery of THE UNDER-PEOPLE! It's (mostly) the same cast of kooky characters and twice-told tales, but Steiger tweaks the perspective just enough with some additional mythology. Material from this book would be heavily recycled by Steiger and Warren Smith for later Hollow Earth releases.

Who lives inside the Earth? Devils, angels, a master race? Cannibal lust demons? Steiger's just asking questions here, and there's room for reasonable debate! A revealing nitpick: Steiger cites the myth of Christopher Columbus disproving the Flat Earth as an example of the establishment brooking no dissent on the shape of the world. Of course, medieval people understood the Earth was round and weren't the ignorant dirt eaters the Columbus Myth would have us believe, but this citation of false historiography serves its purpose for Steiger's laundering of the fringe. A similar example is the common comparison of crank theorists to Galileo, persecuted by the Church. With that pedantic puffery out of the way, let's start digging into "one of the most provocative books of the year" and see if we can't unmask the Under-People!

Classic map by "Shavertron" artist Max Fyfield

Steiger must have had alchemy on the brain around this time, because that's where we lead off, before unearthing some OOP artifacts, mysterious roads and tombs, and celestial visions by trapped miners. There's also a weird black dwarf who gets drunk in a monastery wine cellar and is temporarily recruited as a monk, before being cast back into the darkness as a devil! Talk about a lost weekend. Shambhala and Agharta, Ultima Thule and Hadding Land, these and more mythologies figure into Steiger's decoding of the Under-People's identity. There's also the Zuni and other indigenous peoples' creation myths about an inner Earth origin. After a nasty overview of Pizarro's conquest of the Incas, with attendant myths of underground tunnels and secret treasures, Steiger cites his own New UFO Breakthrough and Harold T. Wilkins on ancient underwater ruins and nuclear bomb shelters.

One "Maggie Rogers" has her manuscript about contact with the Under-People summarized in a chapter. Originally published by Ray Palmer in Amazing Stories alongside the ongoing Shaver saga, it's a similar story, with "Tamil and Nephli" underlords and a druggy, sexed out atmosphere. That phony story of the good ship Jesmond landing on Mid-Atlantic ruins introduces us to a section on Atlantis, and Steiger casts quite a wide net here, dredging up ol' Madame Blavatsky and Edgar Cayce among others. Next we hear from Gray Barker and his Saucerian Bulletin, setting us up for a dark section on Hitler and the Hollow Earth which would also be reused by Steiger and Smith in future. More recycling occurs with Olaf Jansen and the Smoky God - this chapter would be repeated verbatim by both Smith and Steiger in many later books.

We're nearing the end of the saga, checking in now with modern proponents of Hollow Earth such as Marshall B. Gardner who asks "Have the poles really been discovered?" His full text from 1913, A Journey to the Earth's Interior, is available for reading at the Sacred Texts website. His book seems to be the source for the story of the "mysterious origin of the Eskimo" which, again, wound up in many of Smith and Steiger's other books. Finally now Steiger rolls in the big guns and gives us Richard Shaver and Ray Palmer, the two men who most popularized modern Hollow Earth with their eminently readable paranoid pulp fiction. Steiger quotes heavily from an article by Palmer on Hollow Earth and UFOs, which seems to quote without citation from Dr. Raymond Bernard's book The Hollow Earth  on Admiral Byrd's expedition "beyond" the pole. Perhaps this is an error by Steiger or Award Books and Palmer cited Bernard in his original article. A quick sketch of early Hollow Earther John Symmes and a detour to mysterious Mt. Shasta are inserted before we make one final push into that blockbuster Shaver Mystery! By the way, the first five stories of the Shaver Mystery are available to read and download at archive dot org, so you can see for yourself Shaver's strangely compelling psychosexual Pellucidarian saga.

Shaver and Palmer together

After all this melodrama, Steiger ends abruptly by asking us "What do you believe?" This would become Warren Smith's go-to ending for his Zebra specials from the mid-70s, but it's a limp copout line if you ask me: "I dunno, here's some wild stuff. Crazy, huh?" Stick to your guns, Steiger! Or at least steal a better ending!

Available to read and download at archive dot org.

Award Books, 1969

NEW UFO BREAKTHROUGH by Brad Steiger and Joan Whritenour

Brad Steiger and partner in crime Joan Whritenour deliver a tight little text, presenting the more conspiratorial side of Ufology circa 1968 as a NEW UFO BREAKTHROUGH!

The main threads entwined are Gray Barker's Men in Black, Carl Allen (alias Carlos Allende) and his Philadelphia Experiment, and the sinister Shaver Mystery, with additional color provided by Brinsley Le Poer Trench's hippy dippy Sky People and those dear old Dropa Stones. Brad and Joan highlight more than a few people who were threatened or silenced for their attempts at UFO truth, including Carl Allen, Ufologist Morris K. Jessup, and superstar writer of the "Strange" Frank Edwards. Something strange is definitely going on ... Shaver's deadly Deros almost got to me today, and prevented this update entirely! Allen said that the lack of evidence for his teleportation story was actually proof of the Navy's coverup, naturally, while Jessup's death by suicide was really a hit job because he was getting too close to the truth. Ditto for Frank Edwards' death by heart attack. Edwards himself claimed that government pressure forced sponsors to drop his successful radio show after he began focusing on UFOs. Interestingly enough editor Ray Palmer, who popularized the Shaver Mystery as a true story and stands as one of the major figures on the darker side of Ufology, tells Steiger and Whritenour that he doesn't believe in the mysterious Men in Black, having been visited many times by government agents who were always upfront with their credentials! John Keel rails against Ufology's failures in the face of government stonewalling, claiming that he's been two steps behind the MiB multiple times while chasing UFOs.

Barker, Allen, Jessup, and Keel

After outlining the sinister saucer silencers and their brave critics, Steiger and Whritenour quote one Bob Stiff, reporting staff at Whritenour's Florida based UFO newsletter Saucer Scoop, on the "tragic case" of one Mary R., a young Oklahoma girl terrified into catatonia by a UFO sighting. Her mother then receives threatening calls from the silencers! Stiff gets too close to the case and ends up threatened himself! High drama and high strangeness, as twisted as anything penned by Gray Barker or John Keel.

The authors wrangle Wilhelm Reich and his bogus Orgone energy into their UFO coverup based on his arrest by the FBI and his later troubles with the FDA. The FBI claims mistaken identity, saying they only took him in because they mixed him up with a communist bookstore owner with the same name. Glad that's cleared up! The authors tread on dangerous ground defending Reich against charges of sexual impropriety, casting him as a liberated genius striving to better humanity ... an alternate view might be that he was a sex creep cultist using "liberation" as a cover for abuse. For a slim little volume, Steiger and Whritenour pack in a lot of dense material, and pulling a single thread can lead down a dangerous number of rat holes.

Co-author Joan Whritenour (1937-2014)

More saucer attacks follow, including Snippy the horse, with quotations from NICAP and more reporting from Bob Stiff. Next, the Dropa Stones are dusted off to support ancient UFO visitations, along with those fake quotes about nuclear war from the Mahabharata. The authors are kind enough to explicitly cite Paulwels and Bergier, as opposed to von Daniken who simply plagiarized their groundbreaking work. Some great Bigfoot/UFO cases follow including the Florida Sandman that Steiger and Warren Smith use in some of their other books. We get into some truly weird Biblical interpretation courtesy Brinsley Le Poer Trench, who decodes Genesis as a creation story for galactic humanity. The destruction of Atlantis and Velikovsky's catastrophism tie in too, as does Olaf Jansen's The Smoky God, another story of the inner earth a la Shaver. This is another bit that Steiger (and Smith) would recycle many, many times. 

We're getting towards the end, and Steiger and Whritenour toss in a random chapter on alchemy to fill things out, with a dialogue between the authors and an invented alchemist character, Augustus Magnus. Weird. Joan Whritenour finishes with a chapter on "psy-war" and the "mental rape" some contactees are experiencing via voices from the void. Whritenour joins with John Keel and Jacques Vallee in doubting these experiences are extraterrestrial at all, and fears that someone very earthly is planning something sinister ...

Above, a 1974 edition by Tandem for the UK. What a grueling grind! Compelling but draining, pure nonsense but skillfully arranged, Steiger and Whritenour at the top of their game. Recommended for a window into the vintage dark side of Ufology.

New UFO Breakthrough is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Award Books, 1968

OPERATION EARTH by Brinsley Le Poer Trench

Once again, author Brinsley Le Poer Trench wants to make it plain: gotta make way for the Homo superior! As an arch-reactionary hippie, Trench sees the New Age as an opportunity to open our minds to our lost heritage as children of the spacemen, and he links this awakening to an ancient war between the benevolent Space Brothers and malevolent imposters from beneath the Earth. Everything from the Bermuda Triangle to the abduction of Betty and Barney Hill, from Atlantis to Antonio Villas-Boas, is cited as evidence in his melding of the Shaver Mystery with classic Contactee cant.

Trench is logical within the confines of the subject matter, studiously documenting his connections with an extensive bibliography. That his thesis is irrevocably cracked is only natural considering the eclectic personalities involved with the clique behind the Flying Saucer Review.

Operation Earth is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Tandem Books, 1975 (original pub. 1969)

COSMIC DEBRIS: All the Saucers Fit to Print

A goldmine of flying saucer titles are listed in this ad from the December 1958 issue of Flying Saucers: The Magazine of Space Conquest.