A review of The Anomalist:3 by Jerome Clark* reprinted from The MUFON UFO Journal, February, 1996.
The third issue of The Anomalist (dated Winter 1995-96) makes a welcome appearance, proving once more -- fashionable cranky pessimism notwithstanding -- that this is the Golden Age of UFO/Fortean literature. As someone who spends many of his waking hours reading the literature of earlier decades, I ought to know. Sure, there's plenty of junk around. There'll always be plenty of junk around. So what? History will judge us by the best, not the worst, of what we managed to accomplish, and these days we anoma lists are accomplishing two refereed Journals (of UFO Studies and of Scientific Exploration), the magnificent Fortean Studies (edited by Steve Moore and published by Fortean Times), and Huyghe,/Stacy's cheeky, entertaining Anomalist. Perish the thought, b ut could it be that we are actually growing up?
The Anomalist boasts a distinctive character which renders it unlike any other Fortean periodical I have seen. It is certainly not a formal scientific journal, though each issue carries a paper or two or three that could fairly be called formal and scient ific; it is indisputably well-written and -edited and smart, unpredictable enough to give a forum to everybody from professional disbeliever Robert A. Baker (#2) to Donna Higbee who in the new issue reports on something even I, who usually think I have he ard everything (and am invariably wrong), had not encountered heretofore: "Involuntary Spontaneous Human Invisibility." Huh? you ejaculate. Well, hold on.
According to Higbee: "My research has shown the people who have experienced this to be well adjusted, well educated and taken totally by surprise at the occurrence of invisibility. Often it takes several such occurrences before they realize that they are truly invisible durin g certain times to other people. They attempt to interact with those around them and simply can't be seen or heard. This produces frustration and, in many cases, a sense of fear at something which they don't understand."
I should think so. I have experienced involuntary invisibility more than once. Always, for some reason, in restaurants. Okay, dumb joke. Seriously: the experiences of humans can be ragged, confusing, and sometimes passing strange, and I respect Huyghe and Stacy for opening up their journal to stuff such as this, for precisely the same reason I admired my late friend D. Sco tt Rogo's willingness to listen to persons who claimed to have received phone calls from the dead. Perhaps human events, various and multitudinous though they be, are finally finite, but human experiences seem numberless.
More conservatively, Huyghe contributes a pointed short essay on how science receives extraordinary claims which seem to have met the measure of proof the skeptics demanded at the initiation of play. The poor claimant/sap who believes he has abided by the rules suddenly finds that the rules have been rewritten. Huyghe observes, "This practice, often referred to as 'Moving the Goal Posts,' is an extraordinary phenomenon in itself and deserves recognition...Extraordinary proof often seems to mean...a change in the standards of proof... All of which gives a truly extraordinary meaning to the phrase 'extraordinary proof."'
Huyghe could also have noted that Marcello Truzzi, who coined the often quoted (and often abused) maxim about extraordinary claims and extraordinary proof, did not mean that only proponents are answerable for their propositions. He remarks that "the rules of scientific method demand that those who shift from merely expressing doubt to outrightly expressing denial must bear a burden of proof for their negative claims just as do proponents for positive claims." If Truzzi's admonition were followed, of cours e, it would be curtains for many extraordinary debunking claims.
Speaking of which: In "UFO Flaps" skeptic Martin Kottmeyer makes some fairly incredible ones himself, for example that the famous summer 1952 wave was a sort of hysterical response to a steel strike. As a matter of style and principle, I use exclamation p oints almost never, but you will have to excuse my inability to resist italics. Kottmeyer commits the usual errors of the psychosocial theorist, namely the dubious cause-and-effect relationships and unfalsifiable hypotheses without which this particular s chool of ufological guesswork would have little claim on our attention. Eddie Bullard, much the better scholar of the wave phenomenon, is nowhere cited.
To be fair, however, Kottmeyer's piece is two-thirds of a fine piece of work. Rare for psychosocial writing, which is not much inclined to fret over its own obvious shortcomings, it effectively critiques the failings of earlier wave theories (not excludin g it's-all-in-the-psyche-or-in-the-society speculations) before the inevitable letdown, when Kottmeyer unloads his own theory, which turns out to be no less flawed than those he has just skewered. Still, if he is often unconvincing, he is usually interest ing. Few if any urologists know more about Space Age pop culture than Kottmeyer does. Unfortunately, as a UFO theorist, Kottmeyer is an engaging and imaginative historian of entertainment-industry ephemera.
Hilary Evans, Britain's best-known psychosocial theorist, addresses, more successfully than one suspects Kottmeyer would if he took up psychical research, the intriguing question of why ghosts wear clothes. In his analysis Evans adroitly avoids the reduct ionist traps. Perhaps the most interesting revelation here is that there are some, albeit rare, reports of unclad apparitions. Evans writes with humor and insight. It's this sort of essay, literate, intelligent, unexpected, and good-natured, that gives An omalist its particular charm.
The other psychical-research paper is by Michael Grosso, whose notions about Mind at Large, expressed here and in his own books (and in Kenneth Ring's Omega Project [1992]), fail to persuade me but do awe me with their ingenuity. "The Anomalies of Death" is a thoroughly enchanting mental exercise even for unbelievers like the undersigned. Besides, one can only be grateful to the creator of a sentence and concept such as this: "Humans are metaphysical amphibians who simultaneously inhabit physical and ment al dimensions."
Cryptozoology, my favorite anomalous pursuit after ufology, is covered in a splendid 33-page paper by Gary S. Mangiacopra and Dwight Smith on Connecticut's mystery felines, including those ever-vexing black panthers (which one wildlife biologist, not quot ed by the authors, once called the "flying saucers of the animal world") -- critters far more anomalous than even Mangiacopra and Smith, who eventually lose at least some of their nerve, can bring themselves to acknowledge. Well, I don't blame them. A not e at ihe end of the issue informs us that Manglacopra is at work on two cryptozoological books, whose completion and publication I eagerly await.
There's more, but you'll have to find it for yourself. May The Anomalist live long and prosper.
*Clark is the editor of the International UFO Reporter. The third volume of his UFO Encyclopedia, the 800-page High Strangeness, appears in March by Omnigraphics.
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