Future Theater Interview with Kenn Thomas

March 10, 2012
http://www.futuretheater.com/listen-to-past-shows/march-10-2012.html

Tonight's show was just an amazing romp through Kenn Thomas land, where you will hear, as he says on his site Steamshovel Press, "All Conspiracy. No Theory." And I neglected to thank our kind columnist Adam Gorightly for the intro, so I thank him here and now.

We talk about the enigmatic Fred Crisman and the strange way that Kenn was initially drawn into the whole Danny Casolaro story. There's way too much to write about here, so just listen. Then, check out Kenn's books. Welcome to the edge.

You can also download it at The Konformist

http://www.konformist.com/2012/futuretheater031012.mp3

Earth Vs. Flying Saucers With Cloudbusters

Kenn Thomas
29 October 2011
http://silverscreensaucers.blogspot.com/2011/10/guest-blogger-kenn-thomas.html

Critics skeptical of the Roswell flying saucer crash story often claim that interest in the event dropped off immediately after its initial media flash in 1947, only to be revived in the 1980s by unreliable UFO researchers seeking to profiteer from a myth of their own making. I have often contradicted this assertion by pointing out that the scientist Wilhelm Reich paid a visit to Roswell in 1955 and made clear references to aliens in relation to the town in his final book, Contact With Space. It is an unusual book primarily documenting Reich and his assistants using beam cannons to clash with flying saucers--in real life, not on the silver screen.

Researchers have slowly been accumulating Roswell references in movies and other pop culture forms to support the idea that the incident had more of a cultural impact on pre-1980s pop culture than previously has been presupposed. The little Roswell grey aliens appear in a mid-1960s episode of the anime cartoon Prince Planet, for instance. Recently, a 1951 wristwatch ad from the Hamilton Corporation was discovered that referred to the weather balloon explanation for flying saucers, an explanation offered only for Roswell in 1947 until adopted by the Robertson UFO investigation panel of 1952. Another obvious example often escapes notice; however, that again ties the tale back to Wilhelm Reich. It involves the famous 1956 Ray Harryhausen movie Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers.

In that movie, aliens attack the earth in flying saucers and in a few instances the aliens hobble out onto the surface. The creatures look a bit like roll-on deodorant cans with stiff arms and legs. The costumes were used briefly in one other movie, 1961’s The Creation of Humanoids, most recently broadcast following an episode of cable TV’s The Walking Dead series. In Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers, the costumes’ rounded helmets with no features conceal the aliens’ real form until one is killed and his roll-cap removed. The alien looks like a Roswell grey.

Wilhelm Reich had Ruidoso, New Mexico as his destination in 1955 for an overnight stay on his way to Tuscon, Arizona. Passing through Roswell—and Stanton Friedman often makes the point at lectures that few just “pass through” Roswell’s out of the way location—Reich clearly was looking for signs of aliens. In Contact With Space, he writes: “Although it was very hot as we neared Roswell, New Mexico, no OR flow [OR was Reich’s abbreviation for orgone, or natural earth energy] was visible on the road, which should have been shimmering with ‘heatwaves’. Instead, DOR [Reich’s abbreviation for “deadly orgone radiation”, which he believed came from the exhaust of UFOs].”

Reich’s concern about the environmental impact of UFOs stemmed from experiences he had in his lab in Rangeley, Maine called Orgonon. In 1951 he first discovered the DOR business by putting a milligram of radium into one of his orgone boxes, an invention of his designed to harness the natural earth energy. It resulted in highly polluted air around the lab, causing fauna to wilt and animals to become ill. Strange red UFOs appeared in the sky over Rangeley. In response to all this, Reich came up with another invention, the “cloudbuster,” a cannon mounted on the back of a truck that concentrated and redirected orgone, which was aimed and fired at the UFOs, causing them to disappear. In the following years, he brought these devices with him to Tucson, Arizona, passing through Roswell, and did battle with UFOs there.

That happened in real life. It’s an obscure story to many now but apparently a paradigm for the major Hollywood science fiction of the time. Reich’s cloudbuster battles with UFOs are virtually reproduced in Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers. Instead of orgone, earth's scientists develop a sonar canon, but they are mounted onto trucks and directed at the space ships in the same way Reich did it. And the movie was released just shortly after the end of Reich’s desert UFO adventure, so it can’t be said that Reich took his ideas from a fanciful movie. In fact, it seems quite the reverse.

The controversies about Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers in the UFO community relate to Donald Keyhoe's request that his name be removed from the credits following his discovery that it would be a “fictional” movie (see here for details). But was it fictional? The movie may have had little relation to Keyhoe’s book at the time, but did it have another uncredited real life analog?

Kenn Thomas’ essay, “Wilhelm Reich, Eisenhower and the Aliens” appears in Secret and Suppressed II: Banned Ideas and Hidden History into the 21st Century, Edited by Adam Parfrey and Kenn Thomas, available at feralhouse.com. Mr. Thomas’ current book, JFK & UFO, is also available from Feral House. Thomas’ web site is steamshovelpress.com.

Kenn Thomas Discusses JFK & UFO on Coast To Coast AM

Sunday, 11-20-11
1:00am until 4:00am.
http://www.coasttocoastam.com/

Steamshovel Press' Kenn Thomas talks about Fred Crisman, the Maury Island UFO and the JFK assassination (on the anniversary weekend) and whatever other parapoiltical topic that comes up...

Steamshovel Press Reviews

Kenn Thomas, SteamshovelPress.com

Beside Top Secret becomes the latest comic book to attempt to tell parapolitical tales. Rick Thomas in Montreal produced the first issue with hopes to raise money for a continuing series, putting down in four colors (well, on the cover at least) comics depictions of the rise of Disney-type theme parks and the fall of the 9/11 towers. It may be a self-portrait that adorns the cover, a bespectacled and goateed host of the comic with an alien skull cap declaring “Go ahead! Stay stupid! It’s not like I can’t see the appeal of stupid.” Portraits of other sub- hosts to the comic appear in a column on the side, much like an old EC comic. Beside Top Secret adds comic book geek charm to its exposes of conspiracy matter. It includes a comics code stamp in the upper right corner asserting “It’s All Code.” Pretty funny stuff, with some anger and confrontation but also ending on a note sincerely respectful to 9/11 survivors—handwritten yet with typos. Contact the publisher at:

http://besidetopsecret.blogspot.com/

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How fortunate the world still finds itself with one of its finest comics artists still alive and producing fascinating work. Steve Ditko, with partner Robin Snyder, has just published A Ditko #14, new art and stories by the primary developer of Spiderman and Dr. Strange. Comics fans know who he is of course, but two things obscure Ditko's presence from the general public. The first is that glory hog Stan Lee, who provided some small editorial assistance in producing the first Spiderman comics but takes all credit for the property (as with Jack Kirby's other creations) in media today as the character continues to fuel major Hollywood movies (Spiderman gets a silver screen reboot soon.) The second is Ditko's own unfortunate turn to radical Ayn Randian objectivism, a rigid law and order mentality largely removed from human compassion and complexity. It's almost as if Ditko's wild, free flowing artistic form demanded that his psyche lash onto to something. It stunted his story telling capability but never his extraoridanry sense of design and comics art. In these latest productions--part of a small press that Ditko and Snyder have been doing for many years (3745 Canterbury Lane #81; Bellingham, WA 98225) -- provide excellent examples of that. Even at this advanced age Ditko is a Randian warrior, although stories in A Ditko 14 include a simple mob crime tale not often seen much anymore and a new superhero suited for the wild simplicity of Ditko's line called the Distorter. Agree with the philosophy or not, at four dollars, this is hands down the best value in comics today, coming from an unchallenged comics art master who has more often than not confronted serious conspiratorial corruption in a comic world. The current Halloween issue of the fanzine Ditkomania makes a good companion to A Ditko # 14, with in-depth discussion of the history of Ditko's career, only $2.50 from Rob Imes at:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ditkomania

Book Review: Empire of the Wheel

Kenn Thomas, SteamshovelPress.com

Authors Walter Bosley and Richard B. Spence take a novel approach in examining the Zodiac killers crimes, the infamous and still open serial murder case in northern California, as part of their examination of crimes from another time and place. Empire of the Wheel initially uses the narrative of a novel to explore a rather arcane possibility that Zodiac connects to a serial murder case from fifty years previous in San Bernadino. "Her face hit the water," the book begins, "She did not gently submerge; there was nothing gentle about it. It was well into autumn and the water was cold..."

The book proceeds through the stories of the murders of Cora Stanton, the Estep children and others notorious in the 1910s, describing the autumn in San Bernardino and offering almost obsessive detail of the crimes. Bosley and Spence assert that they intend to provide questions avoided by official and press reports, and so atmospherics play a large role in the book as well. The daily press attracts readers with lurid detail and official reports attempt to fit everything into crime and punishment categories. The weirdness of these killings, as well as San Bernadino’s cultural milieu of spiritualism and Mormonism beg a deeper look, which this book provides, making links—via avenues as off-normal as things like telluric ley lines—to the life of Aleister Crowley and even the death of Harry Houdini. Quotes from the likes of Bram Stoker and H. P. Lovecraft pepper the text, reinforcing the frame of mind in which the sleuthing here needs to be viewed.

Empire of the Wheel doesn’t lose the character of documentary, however. A central part of the narrative sets this out fairly concretely: Many authors and cultural researchers, such as John Keel and Jim Brandon, argue that there is an ancient and sinister undercurrent running beneath the bright, modern exterior of American society. Stephen King has made a career out of writing about it. The late ‘mythopoeic political historian’ James Shelby Downard (1913-1998) conjured up a phantasmagorical and unsettling portrait of an America riddled with ‘Masonic sorcery’; “Call to Chaos” cultism and ‘Mystical Toponomy,” an America in which literally nothing is as it seemed….To Downard, the America of ‘baseball-hot dogs-apple pie-and Chevrolet’ was but a facade beneath which the ‘eternal pagan psychodrama’ played itself out in a never—ending cycle, invisible to those uninitiated in its secret symbols and rituals. It is east, and comforting, to dismiss Downard as a simple nut-case because if he isn’t, America is a much stranger place than most of us could possibly imagine.” The writers’ chore here is to link up these disparate murders and arcane history Kell, Brandon, Downard and see if they fit into the perspective that Keel, Brandon and Downard evoke.

This it does, but also as a true crime novel it’s a page turner.

Konformist Book Club: Steamshovel Press Special

SteamhovelPress.com:

POPULAR PARAPOLITICS
NEW E-BOOK!
BY KENN THOMAS

219 pages of commentary on the nexus between parapolitics and popular culture by Steamshovel Press editor Kenn Thomas. Includes first hand accounts of Elvis Presley's funeral; the last of the great Beat writer conferences; and never before published commentary by JFK Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden on famed researcher Sherman Skolnick.

Now available only on CD, as PDF, and through US Mail. $15 post paid to Kenn Thomas, POB 210553, St. Louis, MO 63121.

*

THE NEW ISSUE AND NEW RELATED DVDs
http://steamshovelpress.com/new_order_form.html

Steamshovel Press # 23
All conspiracy. No theory.

CONTENTS INCLUDE:

Charles Fort: Dogma be Damned by Skylaire Alfvegren; Southern California, Cult Mecca, by Adam Gorightly; Parapolitics in Popular Culture: The Prisoner by Kenn Thomas; Notes on Conspiracy Theories, by Jim Keith; Correspondence with Jim Keith; Freeplay Excerpted by Len Bracken; Short Shrift: Beatnix and Comix by Kenn Thomas; Caries, Cabals & Correspondence with X. Sharks DeSpot; Robert Anton Wilson RIP; The O’Reilly Factor In The JFK Assassination by Bill Kelly; Dark Matters by James Romberger.
PDF: $7; PRINT OUT: $10; SUBSCRIPTIONS: $25. Be sure to include e-mail address with order. All checks payable to “Kenn Thomas” at POB 210553, St. Louis, MO 63121


New Steamshovel Press DVDs now available!


Kenn Thomas at Conspiracy Con,
San Jose, CA, May 2007

Moving beyond the confines of 9/11, Thomas reviews the current parapolitics around the globe, starting with the assassination-by-polonium-poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, through the Valerie Plame spy scandal, to the remaining mysteries of the Trade Towers' destruction. "Parapolitics is activity that happens alongside the normal politics people read in the papers and see on TV, not instead of it," explains Thomas. "It's not just a matter of saying that the media just lies and that the Bush baddies are responsible--although gawd knows that's true. We ignore the conspiracies that exist in the wider world, such as global jihad and the assassinations that culminated with Litvinenko, at our peril." This lecture will put these other global conspiracies in the context of what's happening in America. Also includes a tribute to the late author of Illuminatus!, Robert Anton Wilson, including rare footage. 1 hour DVD, $10


Arthur Koestler On Bisociation

Rare footage of famed author of Thirteenth Tribe, Sleepwalkers, Ghost in the Machine and Case of the Midwife Toad, discussing creativity. Koestler explains and demonstrate! s "bisociation", a term Robert Anton Wilson applied to the stud y parapolitics and conspiracy. 30 Minute DVD, $5


PARAPOLITICS, THE VIDEO
90 minute DVD, $10
Television appearances discussing the bug bombs of Korea, JFK Jr., Jimmy Hoffa, Marilyn Monroe; and the parapresidency. Includes footage of the late Jim Keith, author of Saucers of the Illuminati and Mind Control/World Control. ALSO: a rare interview with Christ Conspiracy author Acharya S and paranormalist writer Skylaire Alfvegren’s appearance on the unaired TV pilot, Conspiracy Zone discussing the moon hoax.


KENN THOMAS ON CONSPIRACY
90 minute DVD, $10

Steamshovel editor’s television appearances and lecture footage, including a news report on the UFO he witnessed at Area 51; a roundtable discussion from the Fox network on the JFK assassination, the Y2K affair, global surveillance and conspiracy theory; lectures on the Maury Island UFO and UFO researcher deaths; and the Octopus.


Now available as PDF exclusively from Steamshovel!

PARAPOLITICS BY KENN THOMAS

Join Steamshovel Press editor Kenn Thomas as he tracks parapolitics—aka conspiracy theory—in the 21st Century. Thomas has traveled and lectured about conspiracies throughout America for the past decade, appearing in the major media as the sharpest critic of the consensus view of current affairs. From the Kennedy assassination to 9/11, Thomas examines the underlying parapolitics that animate the secret elites and the war ravaged planet they manipulate. Parapolitics collects Thomas' lecture remarks, interviews, correspondence and articles printed in the underground press from around the world. PDF only, $20 (via disk or supply e-mail address)

Steamshovel Press #23 print out, $10

Steamshovel Press #23 PDF, $7

Kenn Thomas at Conspiracy Con DVD, $10

Arthur Koestler on Bisociation DVD, $5

Parapolitics the Video DVD, $10

Kenn Thomas on Conspiracy DVD, $10

Parapolitics The Book PDF, $10

All of the above discount, $50

All checks payable to “Kenn Thomas” (not “Steamshovel Press”) at
POB 210553
St. Louis, MO 63121

Please supply an e-mail address if ordering PDFs sent via internet. Otherwise, a CD will be sent.

NOTE: Steamshovel Press back issues 4 through 23 are available for $10 each. Photocopies will be supplied when actual issues are no longer available.