Close Encounters of the Fatal Kind: Suspicious Deaths, Mysterious Murders, and Bizarre Disappearances in UFO History by Nick Redfern

Close Encounters of the Fatal Kind: Suspicious Deaths, Mysterious Murders, and Bizarre Disappearances in UFO History
by Nick Redfern
2014, New Page Books

This is my first, and as of this writing only, Redfern I've finished, and it came across just as I imagined - a broad review of a particular topic with no original research.  The topic in question - UFO related deaths, a field that is so thin there isn't even enough made up stuff to fill the book.  Most of it is padding with natural deaths, or deaths only tangentially related to UFOs.

I've seen breakdowns of deaths related to a phenomena and whether they're more common than expected, form JFK assassination witnesses to Wrestlemania participants to Poltergeist film actors.  Everyone dies, it's the proximity in time and the closeness of the subject which gives it an air of the inexplicable. This Venn diagram may help:

The subjects here have increasingly tangential relationships with UFOs.  A classic example is bringing up the curse of the Mothman, a phenomena which is UFO adjacent at best.  In the list of those deaths - there was a movie based on the book.  The movie had a soundtrack.  One of the musician's friends died.  Of natural causes.  With degrees of separation like that, anyone could be included in this book.

Then there's the question of proximity.  Redfern repeats the story of UFO enthusiast Jackie Gleason supposedly getting top secret information from President Nixon, implying that this led to his death.  In 1987.  At least 13 years later.  At age 71. A near 300 pound diabetic with a heart condition who smoked four packs of day and drank a quart of scotch a night.

Redfern must be trolling at this point, including the one person whose longevity is suspicious.

Costs to much at Amazon in ebook, audiobook, and paperback.

The Origins of Horse Hockey - Edward Bulwer-Lytton and the Coming Race

Edward Bulwer-Lytton is sadly best known today for the stupid unfunny award that has his name.  The award is for the funniest, most overblown opening line for a novel, based on the shaky premise that "It was a dark and stormy night" (Lytton's line) is the worst possible opening for a book.  It's not, but it did become a literary cliche along the lines of "the butler did it", thanks mainly to Snoopy.

As someone who actually reads fiction, I've seen plenty of opening stinkers much worse than the award winners.  I always assumed these were actual books, but nope, it's just jokey one-liners written badly on purpose.  This would be like if the Razzies were just clips of people hanging boom mikes into the shot on purpose.

Bulwer-Lytton is far from the worst author ever, and his prose is far more accessible to modern audiences than that of his contemporaries.

I'v spoken about The Haunter and the Haunters; or, The House and the Brain and how it was an early occult detective story and inspiration for the Shadow.

Even more inspirational is 1871's The Coming Race.  In this novel, the protagonist finds himself in an underground world populated by an ancient society of beings called the Vril-ya.  These beings channel an energy force called vril through special staffs.  Vril can both heal and destroy.

The novel was very popular in it's time, largely because of the notion of vril.  Bovril gets it's name from the fictional force.

Here are the three major areas on which The Coming Race had a massive influence:

Civilizations within the hollow earth:

Several prior satires had utopian societies living underground.

The Coming Race seemed to very clearly influence HP Lovecraft's "The Mound", which in turn influenced Richard Shaver, which in turn influenced Jack Kirby's Eternals and countless other areas of science fiction.

The Coming Race also had some influence on Helena Blavatsky, who wrote about contacting ascending masters that lived underground.  Blavatsky has influenced everything from the New Age movement to Ufology.

Ufology

I don't think the Vril-ya were aliens, but various ancient alien variations started being slipped into the template beginning with Lovecraft.  Shaver influenced Jason Bishop, who is responsible for a lot of the Dulce Base material.  Pretty much anything today having to do with secret underground bases can be traced back to this.

Nazi Occultism

The Coming Race probably did little for the Nazis, but it shows up in modern myths about Nazi Occultism.  Thanks to various sloppy writers making stuff up (starting with 1960s Morning of the Magicians), The Vril Society supposedly was the secret occult hand behind Hitler.  It wasn't, but it appears in places like the Wolfenstein games and Legend of Overfiend.

Horse Hockey - Bull Follows Fiction

I'll start here by saying that I deplore how some lazy debunkers find a single obscure example of a phenomena in fiction that predates an allegation as evidence of direct influence.  Of course, just because something happened in fiction first doesn't mean it can't happen in real life, but of more relevance here is the fact that reality and fiction are messier than that.

The transmission of cultural ideas does not consist of single "aha" moments.  It's nearly impossible to point to a single work and say it was the first of anything.  Everything steals from something else, and then gets bitten off some more.

Having said that, the Greys didn't become the stock alien until after Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  UFOs didn't have a standard saucer template until Kenneth Arnold - ironic here, as he described the ship's movements as saucer-like, not their shape.

Conspiracy theorists and pseudoscientists can be an unimaginative bunch, and I swear that got exponentially worse with the internet.  That's one of the reasons I originally lost interest in the field - instead of inventing their own delusions the lunatics were just pointing at random sci-fi shows and saying it was a documentary.

I can't even bother to roll my eyes when I would read that the military has a Stargate like the Stargate in the movie Stargate.  Now you can go and research how the term Stargate was used in fiction prior to the movie, you can find the first usage of the term, you can trace the history of time travel and wormholes in science fiction, but you really don't need to.  Someone just saw the movie Stargate.  Or maybe the TV show - still can't get over how that was a thing.

Such blatant plagiarism is inevitably accompanied by grandiose justifications and further conspiracy theories:

• The government doesn't want you to know the truth about wizards, so it presents Hogwarts as a fiction so that truth-tellers like me will be ridiculed.
• The government is slowly introducing us to the idea of the Galactic Empire so that we won't panic when the Death Star comes into orbit.
• Disney wanted to warn us about menace of talking, pantsless, ill-tempered mallards but had to disguise his warnings as fiction.

These are all bullpoop, but what's worse, it's bullpoop to cover for lazy intellectual thievery.  While I feel it's gotten worse in the last couple of decades, this phenomena goes back to the very origins of modern horse hockey - Helena Blavatsky.

I had assumed the influence was the other direction, but Blavatsky's work came after that of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race.  I'm not expert enough (nor do I care to wade through Blavatsky's bibliography) to say how much of an influence Bulwer-Lytton was on her, but I wouldn't say she lifted her entire cosmology from him.  However, there is the whole "ascended race with special powers living in the hollow earth" thing going on in both.

I'll deal with Blavatsky and the Coming Race in more depth later, but for now, "I'll just leave this here" as the kids like to say.

"Sir E. Bulwer-Lytton, in his Coming Race, describes it as the VRIL, used by the subterranean populations, and allowed his readers to take it for a fiction."

"Absurd and unscientific as may appear our comparison of a fictitious vril invented by the great novelist, and the primal force of the equally great experimentalist, with the kabalistic astral light, it is nevertheless the true definition of this force. Discoveries are constantly being made to corroborate the statement thus boldly put forth."

"The name vril may be a fiction; the Force itself is a fact doubted as little in India as the existence itself of their Rishis, since it is mentioned in all the secret works."

I'll conclude with this - Disney's Michael Eisner revealing the truth about the government withholding facts about alien contact.  A complex double-bluff?  Or just hitting up the X-Files demographic to promote a new attraction?