The following is an excerpt from Chapter 1 of Dark Intrusions: An Investigation into the Paranormal Nature of Sleep Paralysis Experiences, by Louis Proud (available from Amazon US and Amazon UK). Reprinted with permission of Louis Proud and Anomalist Books.

THE SPIRITS WHO FEAST ON YOUR SOUL

The year was 2001 and I was seventeen when my Sleep Paralysis (SP) experiences began. I had previously been living with my father and brother in Tenterfield, New South Wales, in Australia, and had just moved down to Healesville, Victoria, to live with my mother. My new home was a Buddhist retreat center, where my mother worked as a caretaker. My room, no. 25, was located near the office and the main meditation hall. It was a reasonably small and humble room and, like most of those at the Buddhist center, would have suited a monk better than a teenager. Still, it was agreeable enough.

The year 2003, the year after I graduated from high school, was an idle period in my life. Events had taken a rather unfortunate turn, and my future did not look bright. I began to spend most of my days alone, reading in my bedroom with the curtains drawn, and occasionally writing in my journal. The activities I did to keep myself occupied were rarely ever constructive. I would start building something, a model plane, for example, suddenly become discouraged, and put the project aside, never to complete it. Whenever I felt nervous, stressed, or depressed, my SP experiences would become more frequent and more intense. Often, when life becomes unpleasant, one attempts to escape by finding comfort in sleep. But for me, that was becoming less possible.

It wasn’t until mid-2007 that I fully recognized the fact that I suffered from SP. Ever since I first started having episodes back in 2001, I had no idea what was happening to me. I had heard of the phenomenon before, but not enough to know anything substantial about it. At first, I worried obsessively about the state of my mental health. I even began to suspect that I might be developing schizophrenia, or some other serious and debilitating neurosis. When I did finally investigate the subject, I was both astonished and relieved to discover that other people had undergone, and were undergoing, the same bizarre experiences as me.

My SP experiences have changed over the years, gradually becoming more and more intense. They have now reached a kind of plateau, in that most of them are pretty much the same these days, and I know what to expect. Every now and then, however, I will have a particularly frightening or compelling episode, and I will not be able to forget it for a very long time – or at all. Instead of describing any single episode – of which there are only a handful that I remember with total clarity – I will attempt to shed light on what a typical episode involves. To do so, and in the most veracious way possible, it’s necessary that I refer to a short story I wrote in 2005, during the first year of my diploma at RMIT University. ... Read More »

Author, Fortean, futurist, and friend Mac Tonnies passed away this week aged 34. Mac was an original thinker, a poet who could explain strange and confronting topics with intelligence, grace and humour. In his final days, Mac had finished the manuscript for his new book The Cryptoterrestrials (which may yet be published post-humously by Anomalist Books). The following article from the Darklore anthology series shows how honest a thinker Mac was, as he simultaneously considered an alternative and contradictory theory to his own 'cryptoterrestrial' musings. Godspeed Mac.

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UFOs as Vanguards of a Post-Biological Intelligence
by Mac Tonnies

"We are property." - Charles Fort

"We are part of a symbiotic relationship with something which disguises itself as an extra-terrestrial invasion so as not to alarm us." - Terence McKenna

Part of the fun of being a Fortean is second-guessing myself. While many endeavors encourage us to trust our first impressions, the study of unexplained phenomena offers no such luxuries. Researchers of the "paranormal" are instead tasked with policing their own streams of consciousness - a process as rewarding as it is laborious.

In my own case, the study of UFOs and occupant encounters has led me to two predominant interpretations, each at odds with the traditionally accepted Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH). In one scenario, the beings sighted since at least the 1950s (and, if folklore is any indication, long before) are the denizens of an invisible landscape: technologically savvy but impoverished hominids I've dubbed "cryptoterrestrials." In the other, the enduring UFO spectacle is the product of an almost inconceivably ancient machine intelligence not unlike that portrayed in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001. I'll limit the scope of this essay to the latter possibility.

As the human species enters an era of rampant existential threats and finds itself mirrored in the quantum circuitry of would-be artificial intelligences, there's reason to suspect our existence has been monitored (and perhaps even groomed) by a "post-biological" super-intelligence. Although the galaxy is formidably vast, it's also ancient. A growing chorus of pundits clamors over the perceived "Great Silence" that greets our arsenal of electronic listening gear; either we're alone, condemned to solitude on the edge of an unremarkable galactic disk, or we have neighbors. And if even one of these neighboring intelligences has managed to spawn an artificially intelligent offshoot, there's no end to how expansive it might have become in the ensuing millennia.

Suppose we've not only been detected, but catalogued and studied, our very identity eviscerated and infiltrated. What might we expect? Overt acknowledgement on behalf of the overseeing intelligence might be too much to ask, but it seems reasonable to expect an echo imprinted in our mythological and historical records, however faintly. Indeed, our collective psyche itself might bear mute witness to a visitation we don't dare acknowledge for fear of staring too deeply into the abyss.

This article is excerpted from Darklore Volume 4, which is now available for sale. The Darklore anthology series features the best writing and research on paranormal, Fortean and hidden history topics, by the most respected names in the field: Robert Bauval, Nick Redfern, Loren Coleman, Jon Downes and Daniel Pinchbeck, to name just a few. Darklore's aim is to support quality researchers, so it makes sense to support Darklore. Here's the links to purchase from Amazon:

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Silently surveying the rural lands surrounding them, the giant stones impose themselves upon the grassy landscape. Raised by human hands, but dwarfing any man, they are neatly aligned to various celestial phenomena, such as the rising and setting of the Sun at the Solstices and the hitching post of the heavens, the North Star Polaris. Their designers are unknown; they remain a mystery to us – but the Stones give voice to their inner thoughts. Some see in their construction a guiding wisdom for humanity, whilst others feel threatened by the overt pagan overtones and, paradoxically, stark scientific simplicity, of the megaliths and their message.

Far from being the work of an ancient people though, this monument was raised just three decades ago by a group of stonemasons – in the literal sense of the word – from the South of the United States of America. Unlike that other famous megalithic site, Stonehenge, we know exactly how the stones were quarried, how they were finished, and then assembled into one interlocking marvel. And yet, the Georgia Guidestones remain a modern mystery.

Their story begins with the arrival of a neatly-dressed gray-haired gentleman at Elberton Granite Finishing Company on a Friday afternoon in June, 1979. ... Read More »

Mitch Horowitz is a writer and publisher of many years' experience, with a lifelong interest in man’s search for meaning. As the editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin in New York, Mitch has published some of today’s leading titles in world religion, esoterica, and the metaphysical. He has now authored his own book, Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation, (Amazon US and UK) "an engaging, long-overdue portrait of one nation, under many gods, whose revolutionary influence is still being felt in every corner of the globe." This short Q&A discusses a number of the topics covered in Occult America, including Ouija, the occult symbolism on the dollar bill, and the influence of occult and New Age thinking on some of the biggest personalities in US history. You can find more on Mitch and his work at mitchhorowitz.com.

Q: Occult America traces the ways in which occult and magical movements shaped our nation—politically, intellectually, religiously, culturally, and even commercially. Why did the U.S. prove to be such fertile ground for occult movements? What are some primary examples of how the occult influenced American identity and vice versa?

Mitch: Alternative religious movements were entwined with America from its earliest days. In the mid-1600s, just as Europe was experiencing a backlash against occult and esoteric spiritual movements, the American colonies were developing a reputation for religious liberalism. When the town of Philadelphia was a cluster of only a few hundred houses, it hosted faiths ranging from Quakerism to the Mennonites to mystical offshoots of the Lutheran church. The year 1694 marked a turning point for the colonies (and, in many ways, the modern spiritual world) through what initially appeared a very modest event: At that time the first intentional mystical community reached North America when the esoteric scholar Johannes Kelpius led a small sect out of Central Germany to the Wissahickon Creek near Philadelphia. His magical brotherhood practiced its own forms of astrology, alchemy, numerology, Kabala, and esoteric Christianity. News of their “Tabernacle in the Forest” spread back to the Old World and served as a magnet for other occult and esoteric movements. By the early 1700s, admirers of Kelpius formed a new and larger commune at Ephrata, Pennsylvania. In 1776, the Shakers – who were once considered a very mysterious sect – broke ground on a settlement outside Albany, New York. That same year the nation’s first “spirit channeler,” a 24-year-old woman who called herself the Publick Universal Friend, began to preach across New England. Beginning in the early 1800s, a region of Central New York called the “Burned-Over District” became suffused with Spiritualism, Mesmerism, and various occult experiments. These movements helped solidify early America’s role as a safe harbor for religious innovation and eventually made the nation into a launching pad for the revolutions in alternative spirituality that swept the globe in the twentieth century. ... Read More »