Returning once more to the theme of Cold War Lovecraftian horror, Neil Spring’s novel THe Watchers offers fictional speculation as to what was really responsible for a now-famous UFO flap (including the alleged landing of a craft, supposedly witnessed by a group of school children) which occured in Broad Haven, Wales, in 1977.
Note that spoilers are about to follow.
Spring’s solution is that the Broad Haven Triangle (as the case has become known in British UFOlogical circles) was the product of a branch of thr MoD employing occult rituals to summon/contact monstrous interdimensional forces, whose Cthulhuvian provenance is attested to in snatches of faux-Lovecaftian alien chanting (‘Gha D’rcest Cthasska, Gha D’rcest Cthassiss’), and a passing mention of the Pnakotic Manuscripts - along with what I’m presuming is Spring’s own attempt at contributing to the canon of Cthulhu mythos tomes, the Diablonomicon (really?).
Interestingly, the novel also ties the events at Broad Haven to a claim which has been circulating in conspiratorial circles over the past decade: that occult rituals enacted by Aleister Crowley and Jack Parsons in the early-to-mid part of the 20th Century opened up interdimensional portals allowing to the UFO phenomenon ingress into our world. This has, in fact, become a central tenet of an emergent (and, I would claim, heavily Lovecraftian) ‘interdimensinal hypothesis’ (intially championed by Jhn Keel), and which has been replacing the extraterrestrial hypothesis in certain sectors of the UFOlogical scene in recent years.
The inclusion of this plot element is, perhaps, unsurprising, as it is a central to Nick Redfern’s The Final Events, which purports to be an account of a secretive US government think-tank called the Collins Elite, whose members supposedly uncovered evidence that ufos were really the vanguard of soul-sucking demonic ultraterrestrials who want to harvest human souls - a thesis which Spring admits to borrowing for The Watchers. Which of course ties neatly into yesterday’s post regarding Redfern’s referencing of Lovecraftian themes in his writings on the paranormal (and which I have discussed elsewhere on the blog).
Interestingly, in the afterword to The Watchers, Spring infers that he takes the hypothesis of Redfern’s The Final Events seriously - but does so using the rhetorical device of seemingly-detached, non-commital plausible denability (‘Do similar secret investigations continue to this day? The MoD says not, but then of course they have said that before. Readers can draw their own conclusions‘) - a technique which is effectively an act of bad faith, but one which (tellingly I think), is commonly employed within a great deal of contemporary writing on paranormal themes.
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