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

ARCHIVAL UPDATES: THE U.F.O. REPORT & WHY ARE THEY WATCHING US?

Two vintage UFO texts from 1967 by Irving A. Greenfield are now available to read and download: The U.F.O. Report and Why Are They Watching Us? (as Allen Louis Erskine) from Lancer Books and Tower Books, respectively. In both texts Greenfield is hot for the Northeast Blackout of '65 being down to UFO shenanigans.

Original reviews are here and here.

ON THE TRAIL OF UNIDENTIFIED FURRY OBJECTS by Jerome Clark

Jerome Clark investigates the thing that came to visit Roachdale, IN in the summer of '72. Unsettling details like glowing eyes, lights in the sky, a penchant for leftovers, and (almost) no footprints to speak of make this one for the weird "hairy biped" records. Whatever it was, it killed the Burdine family chickens but seemed to leave humans well enough alone ... for now.

Reactions from local authorities were ambivalent. Clark quotes two skeptics, a town marshal and a conservation officer, alongside a neighboring sheriff who put out a bizarre BOLO for a "ten foot tall monster covered in fur." Sheriff Gary Cooper (yup) goes on to say the mystery creature could be a bear, or a badger. Clark describes a horde of rubberneckers descending on the town, the small panic among locals that developed, and also places the case in context alongside other Midwestern monster flaps that year.

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

Courtesy Fate magazine, Volume 26 - Number 8, August 1973.

PASSPORT TO THE UNKNOWN by John Macklin

When a man of such practical outlook and training as the doctor - a man who had once been as skeptical as any about occult matters thus becomes convinced ... it must surely mean something ...

So sayeth John Macklin! The man: Frederick Wood. The occult matters at hand: his past life regression that reveals his prior turn as a general in Pharaoh's armies, some 2,000 years ago! That dating puts him in a pretty rough time for the Ptolemaic dynasty, so it's probably just as well that it's all in the past.

The lovely crystalline cover welcomes us into another reliable roundup of Forteana, courtesy the indefatigable (and pseudonymous) John Macklin. The weakest story in the volume is the very first one, about a ghost who wakes up, and some people see him. Yeah. But we're off to the races after that, with a cursed train, a cursed orchid, a cursed diamond, a cursed u-boat, deathly foxes, an Apartheid assassination attempt, and much much more! Macklin's generous this time around, and we end up with 55 chapters of rapid fire thrills.

We even get a chapter on Betty and Barney Hill's UFO abduction, plus George King's contact with Venus. King founded the Aetherius Society, a UFO religion. These bits of UFO history are packed between haunted cellars and phantom footsteps, stories alternately either long forgotten or just totally made up by Macklin. Cursed train engine D326, for example, really existed and really did have a reputation for being jinxed!

The death train D326, looking not-so-threatening in North Wales

The deadly blue orchid of the very next chapter, though? Well, the internet has only a fragment of the true breadth of human knowledge out there in the world, but I'm drawing a blank trying to verify "Christofo Martena" and "Dr. Andermart" of the "Institute for Tropical Illnesses" of Rio de Janeiro ...

Macklin takes some liberties with the true stories as well, to spice them up. Like D326, German U-boat UB-65 had a real life reputation as a jinxed vessel - but comparing Macklin's version to a 1990 write-up by Commander Richard Compton-Hall of the Royal Navy (retired) hosted at the U.S. Naval Institute shows Macklin gilding the lily a fair bit compared to the possible true fate of UB-65. Macklin's version has UB-65 adrift as a sitting duck off the southern coast of Ireland, but mysteriously exploding before an America sub can fire upon it. The ghostly figure of the dead first-lieutenant appears on deck as the submarine sinks. Comptom-Hall's version plays out as realistic submarine warfare, with the American sub not even sure if it's in battle with one U-boat or two, and unsure which if either has sank. 

Complicating things further, wikipedia describes UB-65's fate using the "sitting duck" narrative (minus a ghost) but does not cite any sources for this! The wiki article does go on to finger one Hector Charles Bywater, British journalist, spy, and military writer, for promoting the haunted ship narrative. Further reading leads to Lost at Sea: Ghost Ships and Other Mysteries by Michael Goss and George Behe, which has a chapter on the legend of UB-65 that, while not mentioning Macklin, does trace the evolution of the "hoodoo curse" from Bywater down to writers like Raymond Lamont Brown publishing in Fate magazine during the '70s.

In analyzing UB-65's legend, Goss and Behe consider the fatalism of German submariners as WWI dragged on, as well as the propaganda value of a "cursed ship" as utilized by Britishers like Bywater.

As for Macklin, one can imagine him thumbing through the same archives trawled by Brad Steiger and co., selecting true tales to titillate and adding his own perfect little touch to each one, to titillate even further - or simply adapting a previously juiced up version of a once-true tale. It doesn't end there, though, as even the copy writers for this book got in on the action: the child's doll that "becomes a killer" on the back cover conjures up images of Chucky, but the actual story is about a family barely escaping certain death due to a premonition not to touch the doll, which lies next to unexploded ordinance on a beach! Keep your wits about you, anyways.

Macklin's tale of newspaperman Ed Sampson's premonition of Krakatoa's world beating eruption turns up online reprinted by the magazine Ireland's Own. Still shocking readers after all these years ...

Indeed, this title is almost 60 years old, and some things have changed less (or less faster) than expected: Macklin ends his chapter about the cursed Koh-i-Noor diamond wondering whether or not Charles will wear it at his coronation, as it supposedly brings bad luck to men. So many midcentury paranormal authors and ESP prognosticators who name checked him would never live to see Charles attain the throne, but Macklin personally may have been relieved to know that when the time did finally come, Charles went without the Koh-i-Noor, and in fact it's on display as part of the Crown of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, at the Tower of London. Crisis averted!

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

Ace Books, 1968

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