Who was Albert Johnson?

Sensing the story of the decade, newspapers reporters began to ask: Who was Albert Johnson? Where did he come from? What took him north and what brought on his duel with the police?

            They called him The Mad Trapper of Rat River, described him as ‘crazed’, ‘demented’, driven mad by ‘cabin fever’.

            Despite what the newspapers said, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police knew that Johnson was not a ‘demented trapper’. Inspector Eames, head of the search for Johnson, said: ‘On the contrary, he showed himself to be an extremely shrewd and resolute man, capable of quick thought and action. A tough and desperate character.’

            The decade was the 1930s. The story became prominent in the Canadian press and beyond as a relief from news of the world-wide depression. In July 9^th, 1931, a newcomer calling himself Albert Johnson arrived at a post known as the Arctic Red River. Part of the job of the RCMP was to check on all newcomers to the region. The depression had resulted in a great many men leaving civilization, as such, behind, and heading into the wilderness with dreams of becoming self-sufficient and living off the land. Most of them were ill-equipped and ill-prepared. They knew nothing of trapping, of how to build a cabin, and how to survive in sub-zero arctic condition for a long winter. A Police Constable would talk with them, assess their abilities and the practicality of their plans. Many arrived without money to buy equipment or supplies and were discouraged from settling, however briefly. Johnson, though, was not of their like. He knew what he was doing and had money to replace his gear, which he said he had lost. He was told he’d need to apply for a licence to trap and the constable left. Before returning to his headquarters, he checked at the local Northern Traders store. Johnson had bought a 16-gauge single barrel shotgun and shells. He had also bought supplies from the Hudson’s Bay post.

            The man who spoke to Johnson was Constable Edgar Millen who was 31 years-old. He had joined the Mounted Police eleven years earlier and was an experienced and capable man. He described Johnson as being around 40 years old, 5 ft. 7 to 5-8, about 11 stone in weight, with blue eyes and brown hair. He spoke little and to the point. The clerks Johnson had dealt with at the trading posts also said he spoke little and said nothing about his past or his immediate plans.

            Despite his taciturn nature, Johnson aroused no suspicions and was left to his own devices. The north was a place were a man who wanted to be left alone would be left alone. So long as he bothered no one else no one bothered him. The trouble began when some Indians reported that Johnson had removed their traps. He had, it seemed, found them placed near his own, objected, and thrown them over the branch of a tree. The complaint had to be investigated. In late December, two constables made the 70-mile journey to talk to Johnson about the traps and to make sure he had his trapper’s licence. Arriving at his cabin, they saw his snowshoes beside the door and smoke rising from his chimney. They knocked. There was no answer. They knew Johnson was inside and, for an hour, tried to persuade to open the door. His behaviour was very unusual for the area. This was a land were doors were never locked and travellers were welcome and certain courtesies traditionally extended. It was a place were people minded their own business but extended help when it was needed. There was a practical side to the generosity – they might be in need of help and shelter themselves someday. The police left and reported the incident.

            A warrant was issued and four constables arrived at Johnson’s cabin on the morning of New Year’s Eve. Again, they saw the smoke and the snowshoes. Constable A W King knocked on the door. A shot was fired through the door and Constable King fell to the ground with a bullet in his chest. The other constables opened fire. Johnson returned fire. King was not dead and managed to drag himself to a clump of trees. His condition was serious and the others put him on a sledge and raced for medical help. Constable King survived. He said afterwards; ‘All I wanted to tell him was to leave the Indians’ traps alone. Then all he had to do was get a trapper’s licence and he was all set.’

            The first thought of the officers was that Johnson was suffering ‘cabin fever,’ the mental illness occasionally brought on by living for months in isolation, darkness and sub-zero temperatures. But Inspector Eames had the growing conviction formed of long experience that Johnson actions indicated an intense hatred of the police. He led a party of six men to Johnson’s cabin. Constable Millen was to meet the posse at a post on the way as he was the only had met Johnson and knew what he looked like. The constables who had previously visited Johnson also noticed that his cabin was very solidly built. The door was only large enough for him to enter and beside it was a small window. It was described later as ‘fort-like’.  The walls were 5 ft high on one side and 4ft on the other to allow for a sloping roof which, in turn, was covered with 2 ft of dirt. Three side of the cabin were covered by the bend of the river, the fourth side, facing an open clearing and been built with a double wall. Inside the cabin, Johnson had dug down 3 ft into the ground. Knowing how secure the building was, the Mounties brought dynamite. The problems for the RCMP intensified when the temperature dropped to 40 below zero. On January the 8^th, they arrived at Johnson’s cabin. He was still there. Why? He must surely have realised that after shooting a constable and firing at the others a posse would be sent after him. He’d had eight full days to leave. Since their last visit, Johnson had cut low rifle-slits into his cabin. He could cover every approach and, due to the size of his cabin – no more than 8 ft by 12 – he could move quickly to whichever direction he need to fire from.

            Inspector Eames called for Johnson to surrender. There was reply. The six constables began firing from different sides to distract Johnson while they took turns running at the cabin and attempting to batter down the door with rifle butts. The door was finally jarred loose and the constables saw Johnson crouching in the hole he had dug. He turned to fire at them with what they thought were automatic pistols. What he actually used was his shotgun and a .22 rifle which he had sawn off the barrels and the butts and was using as short-range weapons. Eames gave the order to use the dynamite. But first it had to be defrosted. When thrown towards the cabin, most failed to explode and those that did caused little damage to the firm walls. Finally, a large charge was thrown on the roof. The explosion created a small hole in the roof and blew off the chimney. Johnson continued to return fire.

            Inspector Eames decided on one last attempt in the early hours of the morning. His men were suffering from the cold and lack of sleep. He used all of what was left of the dynamite. It worked. The dynamite exploded with a thunderous crack exactly against the cabin were Eames had intended it to fall. The blast, he felt sure, must certainly have stunned Johnson if not killed him. Eames and another constable charged the cabin. Although the cabin had almost collapsed on top of him, Johnson was uninjured and certainly not stunned. He opened fire immediately, smashing the light the constable was carrying.

            Eames led his men away from the cabin. Their siege, in conditions of minus forty, had lasted eighteen hours without rest.

The remains of Johnson's cabin

            After two days of rest, Constable Millen left with another man under orders to determine of Johnson was still alive. The approached his cabin, very cautiously, in daylight when they were fully able to appreciate the damage done by the dynamite explosion. The front wall and been blown in and the roof had all but collapsed. It was difficult to believe anyone inside had been able to survive. But not only Johnson survived, he was gone. He had abandoned his canoe and a cache of his supplies but had left nothing in his cabin.

            The main posse set out again on January 16^th. Two days later they met Millen’s messenger and discovered Johnson was gone, despite the blizzard that was blowing. For the next four days the posse looked for trails. By January 21^st, Inspector Eames had decided to return to base with most of his men in order to preserve supplies for another ten days search with Constable Millen left in charge. Millen, with four men, found a trail, then, in the high country, they lost it again. An Indian who had heard two shots led them to a trail which bore the distinctive marks of Johnson’s homemade snowshoes. Johnson had doubled-back.

            On the 30^th of January they followed the trail to a natural fortification of fallen trees and large boulders. As they circled around the post, Johnson opened fire. As Johnson fired on Millen, Carl Gardland saw him and fired off a quick shot. Johnson dropped. There was no further reply from Johnson’s guns. They were convinced Garland had hit the man. They waited two hours. There was not the slightest movement from Johnson’s shelter. Cautiously, they approached. When they were within 25 yards, Johnson suddenly leaped up firing on them. While the others dived for cover, Millen, still standing, calmly and taking care in his aim, fired two shots. Johnson fired three and Millen fell. Gardland, lying flat, managed to pull Millen to cover by his bootlaces but Millen was already dead. One man was sent with a dog-team to take back the message of Millen’s death. The rest continued firing intermittently until night fell then they settled themselves to watch Johnson’s camp.

Constable Edgar Millen

            When Inspector Eames learned of Millen’s death, he set off with a large posse on February the 2^nd. An airplane he had requested to help in the search left Edmonton the following day. Edmonton was 1,800 miles away.

              Meanwhile, the men keeping vigil at Johnson’s camp discovered he was gone, nor was there any evidence that he had been wounded.

            When the main party reached the others, they split themselves into several smaller groups and set off in all directions in an attempt to find a trail. On February the 7^th, they discovered that rather than running from them, Johnson had circled back and was lingering in the area, watching his pursuers as though playing a game with them. He had set false trails for them to follow and, at one point, two parties following separate trails had found themselves face to face. Johnson had been wearing his snowshoes backwards to mislead them. Given his skill at concealing his trail and his speed at covering great distances, he had more than enough time to vanish completely out of the territory. Why had he stayed?

            The plane finally arrived, piloted by the Canadian World War 1 air-ace, Captain W. R. May, who had shot down thirteen enemy planes and decoyed the Red Baron into flying over enemy lines the day the legendary German pilot was shot down and killed. With May up in the air, an area that might have taken the posse a day or two to cover was searched in minutes. False leads were immediately eliminated and a remarkable thing was discovered. Johnson had always been in relatively close proximity to his pursuers. Johnson was circling back on his own trail to camp for the night just beyond it in order that he might watch it. The pursuers were amazed at Johnson’s stamina. Despite a spotter plane and twenty experienced men after him, Johnson was out-thinking, out-running and out-enduring them.

            Reinforcements arrived: two expert trappers and two Indian volunteers, along with another constable.

            While the posse was no closer to catching Johnson, the story was being reported from coast to coast. On February the 11^th, a photograph of Albert Johnson appeared on the front page of a newspaper. No detail as to the man’s background was provided but he was identified as the killer of Constable Millen. It was Albert Johnson, but not the Albert Johnson. It was a resident of Princeton, British Columbia, and he was not happy to be called The Mad Trapper. He went to the Vancouver offices of the newspaper and demanded a retraction. He got it.

            On February 12^th the posse were beginning to think they had lost Johnson when an Indian marched into camp to tell Inspector Eames that he had come across the tracks of Johnson’s snowshoes. Due to bad weather, May could not get into the air until February 14^th. It was late in the afternoon and daylight was already waning but, almost immediately, May sighted a trail left by Johnson. He had crossed the Barrier River Pass. What might have been a four-day advantage over the posse was cut to one by the airplane sighting. Eight men set off to follow Johnson’s trail over the pass and found it ‘one hell of a trip’. They could not help having a grudging respect for Johnson who had managed it alone.

            For five days the searchers followed Johnson who was still laying out trail and counter trail. He wasn’t able to light a fire or shoot game for fear of alerting the posse to his position. He survived by snaring squirrels and brewing tea over miniature fires concealed in tiny caves by the riverbanks.

            On the morning of February 17^th, the freshness of Johnson’s tracks indicated he was not far ahead. It was then that Johnson made his first and last mistake. He had climbed a tree to spot the posse. He saw them moving to the south. They were actually headed for a bend in the river which would take them north again. Johnson set off away from the posse and after about half an hour he turned a bend only to find them directly in front of him and heading his way. Johnson laced on his snowshoes and made the river bank before two of the posse could open fire on him. Staff Sergeant Earl Hersey was also the radio operator. He was the first man to fire at Johnson. ‘I’m not the killer type,’ he said. Hersey aimed for the heavy pack Johnson carried on his back, full of his cooking utensils, blankets and other gear. The shot knocked Johnson off balance and he fell. Two more wounding shots knocked Johnson down but each time he got up. Finally, he reached for his gun. Hersey had a .303, ‘which is accurate as all got out.’ Johnson had a .30.30, accurate to one hundred yards. The distance between them was 125 yards. ‘I wasn’t worried about him hitting me,’ said Hersey.

            Hersey was down on one knee, steadying his rifle, ‘being very, very careful of my aim.’ Johnson pointed his gun straight at Hersey and fired without hesitation. The bullet went through Hersey’s elbow, knee and chest. He survived to tell his story fifty years later. The posse caught up with Hersey’s position. Eames called for Johnson to give up, but he continued firing from behind his backpack. The posse of Mounties, soldiers and Indians surrounded him. By the time they stopped firing, Johnson had 17 bullets in him but they only approached after being informed by Captain May in the plane above that Johnson was dead.

            ‘There is something about the way a dead man lies that is unmistakable,’ said May. He dipped his wing-tips to signal Johnson’s death to the posse. By the time he landed, the men who weren’t helping Hersey were standing around Johnson. May stepped around to get a look at him. He was lying face down on the frozen river. ‘As I stepped over and saw him, I got the worst shock I think I have ever had. Johnson’s lips were curled from his teeth in the most terrible sneer I’ve ever seen on a man’s face… his teeth glistened like an animal’s… it was the most awful grimace of hate I’ll ever see.’ Emaciated, Johnson’s ash-grey skin was pulled back on his bones and his eyes remained half-open, staring out from deep in their sockets

            When Johnson’s body was loaded upon a sleigh for the trip back suddenly went wild, snarling and barking, seemingly terrified by the body. They continued to fight hard against taking the trail and howled grimly. The driver tore them apart with rifle butt and lash but, far off down the frozen river, their howling could still be heard.

Back at base, Captain May learned some further details of Johnson’s hunt from Inspector Eames. Johnson, he had learned, had crossed the Divide over the highest peak, which was over 8,000 ft. Said May: ‘That trip over the mountains must have been one long agony for him… there wasn’t a scrap of firewood available… he must have spent at least one night in that high altitude without a fire. We marvelled anew at the tremendous vitality this man must have possessed and the indomitable will power he had shown in tackling the mountains. Few people in the Arctic cross those mountains in the wintertime, even with dogs and plenty of supplies unless they are compelled to.’

Of the seventeen bullets which had struck Johnson, the first had hit his hip pocket which held his ammunition. The ammunition exploded, tearing a huge wound in his hip. All the other bullets were in his legs, back and shoulders. The shot that finally killed him had passed through the small of his back, severing his spine. At the end, his feet, legs and both hands were frozen, probably from his night in the mountains. He was emaciated from lack of food. He had dropped most of his supplies and only carried his weapons and ammunition. He also had $2,500 in Canadian and US currency, said to be a fortune in cash for the Arctic. The officers had never seen a sawn-off shotgun before in the north. It was the weapon of gangsters and murderers in the big cities. Where had Johnson learned to make one? And what use would it be to a trapper? Also discovered were two gold bridges, presumably from a man’s mouth, but not Johnson’s mouth. Another grim find was made. Johnson, apparently, had no intention of being taken alive. On inspection, a loose butt plate on his weapon was removed. A cleft and been cut in the wood and a single bullet placed there – a bullet Johnson had saved for himself, if needed.

But who was Albert Johnson?

Captain May was certain he was an Idaho murderer named Coyote Bill. Cayote Bill had been a trapper and was wanted for murder and robbery. He had led a posse on a chase through an Idaho wilderness area called The Craters of the Moon and, when he vanished, he was believed to have been heading for the Yukon or the Canadian North. May saw his picture in Detective Magazine and was sure this was the frozen face he had seen in the snow.  Cayote Bill, a criminal and associate of gangsters would have known how to make and use a sawn-off shotgun. Being a wanted man on the run would also explain his unprovoked shooting of a police constable knocking on his door to talk to him about traps and a hunting licence, and the ‘fortress cabin’ Johnson had built with a sunken floor, double-logged wall and rifle slits. This was far too much back-breaking labour for a simple trapper’s cabin, but perfectly explicable for a killer on the run afraid of being tracked down. The only problem with May’s theory was that Cayote Bill’s fingerprints were in file and they did not match Johnson’s. 

            The most likely candidate to be Albert Johnson was a man called Arthur Nelson. A man calling himself by that name bought six boxes of kidney pills in the Spring of 1931 Similar pills were found in Johnson’s possession after his death. Nelson had arrived in the Yukon in 1927. Like Johnson he was not particularly talkative or informative. Other than a trader named Roy Buttle who had offered to help the stranger make a canoe, Nelson spoke to no one and camped at least a half-mile from the settlement. Buttle also noticed something very curious about Nelson, or rather, about the effect he had on the local Indians. The Indians living around the Post were visibly afraid of the stranger and would have absolutely nothing to do with him. Buttle wondered, why? It wasn’t because he was an intimidating giant. He was only around 5 ft 7 to 5-8, weighed perhaps 11 stone, and was of a well-proportioned but slight build. Buttle asked the Indians. They were reluctant to speak of their fear but one of them spoke, muttering only word, ‘Wendigo’, meaning a bad spirit or some such thing.

About a year later, nelson returned to the same settlement. He told Buttle that he had been trapping at Ross Lake. He bought a Savage .30.30 carbine and some .22 shells, the same type of weapons Johnson owned. Nelson was spotted intermittently over the next year by trappers he spoke to and at places he traded. Between 1929 and 1931, Nelson hunted in the Macmillan River district. Before leaving the Macmillan district, Nelson bough the kidney pills that connected him with Johnson. Kidney pills were said to be beneficial for:

‘A Cold, Backache, Disturbed Urine, Discolored Urine, Brickdusty Deposits, Irregularities, Suppressions, Female Weakness, Dragging Down, Lame Back, Spinal Weakness, Neuralgia, Rheumatism, Catarrh of Bladder, Stone in the Bladder, Heart Trouble, Shortness of Breath, Dropsical Swellings, General Debility, Wasting Away Disease, Diabetes, Bright's Disease, Eruptions and Sores, Paralysis, and all Impurities of the Blood.’

Clerk, Archie Currie, of Binet’s Store was surprised when Nelson bought six boxes but Nelson was so taciturn that Currie did not engage him in conversation. In May 1931, Arthur Nelson disappeared. In July 1931, Albert Johnson appeared.

When Johnson was killed, his possessions were gathered and itemised. He had a Savage .30.30 rifle, a sawed-off 16-gauge shotgun and a .22 Winchester rifle with a cut-down stock. He had shells to go with his guns and a package of 32 kidney pills. Fingerprints taken from the corpse were sent to Ottawa and Washington D.C. No identification was made. Although there was no conclusive evidence that Albert Johnson and Arthur Nelson were the same man, circumstantial evidence would seem to make the case probable. So, Albert Johnson, in all likelihood, was Arthur Nelson.

But who was Arthur Nelson?  

Ha ha ha ha...

Che Guevara and St. Danny McGrain

St. Danny

When everyone is wearing their hero’s picture on their T-shits and has a poster of them on their walls, who’s face does the hero put on his T-shirt and walls? In the case of Che Guevara it was that of Daniel Fergus McGrain. While many conventional historians cite Guevara’s meeting with Raul and Fidel Castro as the inspiration which led to his becoming a revolutionary, Guevara wrote to friends in later life that the catalyst in his life had been a meeting with Danny McGrain while on a fact-finding trip to Europe. Prior to his meeting with a young McGrain, said Guevara, he had merely been a fellow traveller with the Castro brothers. It was only after McGrain inspired him that he became fully committed to the cause of world-wide revolution and he left Cuba in 1965 to foment revolution abroad. Incredibly, Danny McGrain was only fifteen at the time of their meeting, while Guevara was 37. Perhaps it takes a man of maturity to recognise and admit the wisdom of a much younger man, in fact, a boy.

Guevara in his favourite Celtic top

And what was it McGrain said to Guevara? McGrain told Guevara of his childhood in Drumchapel, an area of Glasgow built in an attempt to solve the problem of the inner-city slums which, in time, only resulted in becoming a slum-estate itself. McGrain, at the time, played for the famous Queen’s Park Strollers. He told Guevara that his ambition, despite being a Protestant, was to play for the great Glasgow Celtic. Guevara had never heard of the club and, when McGrain explained their history to Guevara, Guevara said an energy passed from McGrain which resulted in nothing less than an epiphany for the Cuban Revolutionary. From that day forward Guevara followed every game Celtic played and, just before he was killed on October 9^th 1967, he said that he would be able to die a happy man as he had seen Celtic lift the European Cup earlier that year. When Guevara was stripped for the famous picture of him in death which revealed his bullet-wounds he was found to have a picture of Danny McGrain and himself in his wallet, as well as a copy of the Glasgow Celtic badge. He also had an enlarged picture of McGrain on the wall of his room underneath a picture of Billy McNeil raising aloft the European Cup.

Pope Benedict XVI celebrates St. Danny's Day

McGrain went on to an illustrious career with Celtic and, when he retired from the game after the 1987/88 season, the then Archbishop of Glasgow, Thomas Winning - later to become Cardinal Winning - recommended the Pope fast track McGrain for Sainthood. When reminded by his subordinates that the process of Canonisation was lengthy and required documented evidence of at least two miracles, the Archbishop said; ‘He’s responsible for more than two miracles… and I’ve got them all documented!’ At which he produced a compilation video of McGrain’s greatest games for Celtic. After watching the evidence one evening, Pope John-Paul II said, ‘That’s good enough for me!’ and ordered the process to begin.

In a remarkable exception to established tradition and procedure, it was believed that no member of the Church might display a suitable degree of objectivity to act as Devil’s Advocate, and so the Right Reverend Doctor Ian Paisley and Pastor Jack Glass were invited to fulfil the position and duly accepted. On being shown the evidence, Dr Paisley began to weep, while Jack Glass shook his head in astonishment. Neither, they said, could present any argument against the evidence much as they would like to. Daniel Fergus McGrain became Saint Daniel Fergus McGrain on the 20^th August 1993.

 Roberto Carlos

McGrain has not only inspired revolutionary leaders. A young Roberto Carlos saw McGrain score his only goal in the 1982/83 season against Dumbarton. Carlos watched McGrain take the ball from keeper Paddy Bonner, stroll incredibly casually out of defence and into midfield, shimmy his way through the opposition, beating player after player, before finding himself in front if the opposition goal and placing a right-footed bending shot into the top left corner of the net. In later years, Carlos said that up until that moment he was unhappy being a defender and wanted to change position but, after seeing the genius that was Danny McGrain, he realised the full possibility and potential of being, in his case, a left-back and all doubt left him.

  

Pope Francis shows off his special robes for St Danny's Day

The Disappearing UFOs of Beattock.

Sometime in the mid-1980s I had been watching a programme about UFOs. I asked my mother if she had ever seen one. ‘No,’ she said. There was a momentary pause and then she added; ‘But your Dad has.’

Now, more surprising to me than the fact that someone I knew had seen a UFO was the added fact that it was my father. He was, and is, the most pragmatic person I have ever known, not given to fancy or speculation. In fact, if I’d had to guess his opinion concerning UFOs I would have immediately said he’d be a sceptic. For some reason, I forgot all about this revelation until three years ago (2017) when I suddenly remembered it and decided to ask him about it.

The trouble is, my father is not the most talkative or revealing of men. He would make a perfect spy and drive his captors insane as they tried to get the most trivial uncompromising information from him. He would also be perfect under questions by a lawyer if you wanted someone to reveal nothing incriminating as he never volunteers information. I’ll give you a sample of how it went.

Me: ‘You saw a UFO once?’

Him: ‘Hm.’

Me: ‘Well, did you?’

Him: ‘Aye.’

Me: ‘When was that?’

Him: ‘Don’t remember…’

Me: ‘Was it in the 70s?’

Him: ‘Around then… late 70s… or early 80s…’

Me: ‘Where were you?’

Him: ‘In the car.’

Me: ‘No… I mean, where did you see it?’

Him: ‘In the sky…’

Me: ‘No… I mean, what part of the country where you in?’

Him: ‘The Borders.’

Me: ‘Where at the Borders?’

Him: ‘Just outside Beattock.’

Me: ‘Did anybody else see it.’

Him: ‘Aye.’

The celebrated Moffat Toffee

Well, that’s enough of that. You get the picture. After some more questioning I managed to piece the information together. He and a workmate where travelling north, back to Glasgow, through Dumfries and Galloway when they saw something in the sky just outside of Beattock. Beattock is a village just south of Moffat which is famous as the home of the celebrated Moffat Toffee. Beattock Summit is the highest point on the M74. He recalls that it was dark in the early evening so he must have seen the object sometime in the late Autumn, through Winter, to early Spring. It was, he said, shaped like a VW Beetle seen from the side and glowed a white orange. It hovered for a while, zig-zagged, then disappeared. Not only did my father and his work mate see it, but so did everyone in the cars before and after them, including a police car, and they all slowed to look at it. Due to the height and distance of the object it was impossible, he said, to estimate its size. I asked him if he mentioned the sighting to anyone. ‘Your mother,’ was all he said. Had his workmate told anyone? ‘Just some of the lads at work.’ And what had they said. ‘They laughed.’

A VW Beetle seen from the side

After speaking to my father, I looked up ‘UFO Beattock’ on the internet. Within the top three listings was a report about a spate of UFO activity around Beattock in the late 1970s. There was a copy of a newspaper clipping noting the sighting. A few days ago, I was reminded of the incident again and I decided to read some more on it. I again typed ‘UFO Beattock’ into the search engine. Nothing came up. I tried every variation I could thing of, using words like Moffat, Dumfries and Galloway, Scottish Borders, Flying Saucers, etc. Still nothing. The item had gone the way of the UFO and disappeared into another dimension. I contacted two of the main UFO information/report sites, UFOINFO and BUFORA and asked them if they had any information. UFOINFO never got back to me and the other said:

‘I am sorry, but we would not be able to help you without a specific date and year, particularly as this could be nearly forty years ago. It also would depend on whether your father reported this to our organisation.

To convince myself I wasn’t imagining the whole episode, I asked my father about it again last night. ‘UFO…’ he said, and scratched his head looking uncertain and thoughtful. Just as I was about to suspect the Men in Black had erased his memory, that the Ultraterrestrials were out to get me, he said. ‘Hm… near Beattock.’

If anyone has any more information about UFOs over Beattock, please get in touch.

Dillinger's Ghost

            John Dillinger’s ghost appeared to me in the Monte Vista Hotel in Flagstaff, Arizona. I wasn’t staying there at the time. I was staying at a motel on Route 66 just outside the old town. I wanted to leave the motel because it smelled like there was a corpse under the floor, rotting. Wandering through the old town, I saw the Monte Vista. When I asked the man at the desk if they had any vacancies, he said ‘Sure. Would you like to look at the rooms?’

Hotel Monte Vista

When I said yes he handed me a key he lifted at random from the wall behind him. I wandered upstairs by myself, along a narrow corridor with golden-yellow walls and no windows. I felt an errie, claustrophobic sensation. Unheimlich. I opened the door to the room. It was decorated in shades of golden-yellows and browns. The mirror had an ornate frame in gold. All very kitsch. I looked in the bathroom, then looked out the window at the view. It was as I turned from the window that I saw Dillinger smile his lop-sided cynical smile at me from the full-length mirror on the wall by the bathroom door. I recognised him as Dillinger immediately. I was familiar with pictures of him.

            I went downstairs and the desk-clerk smiled at me. ‘How d’you like it?’ he asked. ‘Great,’ I said, and checked in for three nights. The three nights were uneventful. I asked the desk-clerk if John Dillinger had ever stayed there. ‘Who?’ he asked. He had no idea who Dillinger was. It was only later that I sat and read the hotel’s brochure which claimed the hotel was haunted, although there was no mention of Dillinger.

Dillinger

According to the brochure, John Wayne was one of the first guests to report a ghost. In the 1940s and 50s, around 100 films were made at nearby locations and the stars stayed at the Monte Vista, including Wayne, Gary Cooper and Spencer Tracy. A scene from Casablanca was filmed in one of the hotel rooms. Wayne said the ghost that appeared in his room was friendly. In room 210, guests are often said to be woken by a phantom bell-boy knocking on the door, announcing room service. When they open the door there is, of course, no one there. In a room on the fourth floor, people are reported to have seen or felt the presence of two women murdered there in the 1940s, prostitutes who were thrown to their death from a window. There are other ghosts reported to haunt the hotel but no one has ever mentioned seeing the ghost of John Dillinger, probably because there’s no record of him ever having been there. But then Dillinger was known to use aliases. It’s not entirely improbable that Dillinger stayed in the Monte Vista as he certainly travelled through Arizona. In 1934 he was arrested in Tucson, Arizona, from where he was transferred to the Lake County Jail in Crown Point Indiana from which he made his notorious escape with a piece of soap he’d whittled into the shape of a gun and blackened with boot-polish.

           

Not Dillinger

Dillinger might never have been in the Monte Vista Hotel but one bank robber certainly died there. In 1970, three man robbed a bank nearby. One of the men, wounded in a shootout following the robbery, took refuge in the hotel’s bar and died there with a drink before him. Staff are said to hear him say ‘Good morning,’ when they open the bar each day. I can understand people hearing the ghost of a bank robber who died in the hotel’s bar, or who see the ghosts of two prostitutes murdered on the fourth floor, or who hear the knock of a phantom bell-boy who might have worked there for a number of years. But Dillinger? Why should I see Dillinger’s ghost there? Even if he was a guest, however briefly, he died outside the Biograph Theatre in Chicago. If he should haunt anywhere, shouldn’t it the Biograph, or whatever property occupies the space these days? Perhaps, we take our ghosts with us. Though why I should see John Dillinger’s ghost I have no idea. Up until I saw his ghost, I had no particular interest in him, except for having watched a documentary once in an idle hour. Maybe it’s a random haunting.

            Carl Jung believed there was always a psychic element to hauntings. But that isn’t to say it was all in the mind. People who saw ghosts, he believed, had somehow invested the apparition with psychic energy which allowed it to manifest. No viewer, no ghost. It was a two-way trade. The ghost only revealed itself to the right person, the person who was willing to part with a little energy.

            Why is the Monte Vista such a haunted location? It isn’t a particularly old building, not by 

A room in the Monte Vista

European standards, and was built as recently as 1927. It would be nice to imagine the land it is built on was once an Indian burial ground, an Arizona Overlook, so to speak, but there is no mention of such a history and I’m sure if such had been the case the hotel owners would have advertised the fact. Are some locations more conducive to hauntings than others? If so, is it on account of the location? Does the land itself generate such energies as to make the location a locus of apparitions? Or is it something in the make-up of the building, some quality of the materials from which it was built that can store elements of the past, whether visual or audible, to release them intermittently? I once heard a speculator on the paranormal claim that buildings made of stone with a high slate content are more liable to produce strange sounds than buildings made of other materials. He believed that the slate in the stone could store sound and pointed to the analogy of early records which were made of slate. As the needle on the slate records released the recording, so the contraction of the stone at night when the temperature dropped might be the cause of the errie noises reported in these buildings.  

            I once found myself wandering in Central and South America with a friend. I’ll call him Doc although he wasn’t a doctor but he did have three years medical experience. In his fourth year a dark cloud was seen over campus. He left under it. On one occasion, we arrived at a village in time for a local fiesta and were invited to join in. The event was to take place in an abandoned structure which seemed an unlikely spot for a party. The building inside was gloomy and uninviting. It had been a storage depot for a mining concession which had been abandoned when a more profitable source of ore with easier access had been discovered. But I watched in fascination as the people converted this inauspicious location into a magical area prepared for dancing and feasting. A generator was set up and a thousand wires run off from it to light small bulbs inside coloured bottles. A decoration resembling large streamers of Christmas tinsel was hung all over the walls. On a closer inspection I saw the tinsel was made from pieces of intertwined wire and coloured strips of plastic cut from whatever material the plastic had originally constituted. The band was a sight to see. They looked as if they had been gathered together from some hobo jungle and promised a free drink if they’d put in an appearance. The band numbered seven in total and had the oddest assortment of instruments, all apparently home-made or put together from a patchwork of found and broken instruments. Their clothing, also, didn’t bare much scrutiny. And nor did their faces. To judge by their complexions they spent as much time drinking as they did playing. An occupational hazard, one of the locals told me, because the men would often play for free and, as soon as they arrived, they were offered a drink. Throughout the night of the dance people continually brought them more free drinks until the party finally ended when no more musicians were standing.

The windowless hallways of the Monte Vista 

I wondered what kind of racket might come from their weird assortment of instruments but when they started up the effect was nothing less than miraculous. One man who played a trumpet of sorts also sang and the sound that came out of his mouth would have graced any concert hall in the world. The man had the most misshapen lips I have ever seen – from long years of playing his trumpet, I supposed – and his teeth sprouted from his gums at differing angles and such varying degrees of rottenness that it was a mystery how such a beautiful sound might emerge from such an unpromising source.

Not the Monte Vista

And then the women arrived. They had clearly been at great pains to prettify themselves, wearing their best dresses and blouses which looked very garish in colour and with the colours uncoordinated. They had decorated their dresses with paper flowers and had contorted their hair into various styles. Some had real flowers in their hair.

The power and magic of the fiesta changed everything into a timeless scene. It was a ritual that had perhaps been repeated since the earliest of humans had grouped themselves together. The women looked beautiful, dignified, charming, elegant and poised. The men looked like gentlemen. The band looked like maestros. The disused depot looked like a palace, or more accurately, a fairy-grotto.

The party had been in full swing for some time, everyone chatting, laughing, joking, dancing. Then… something strange happened. I had the bizarre feeling that some presence had manifested itself, that even the air had changed in quality as though some mysterious malevolent power hovered over us like a huge winged beast, crazy as it sounds. The manner of the crowd was suddenly changed. It was as if the happy energy had been drained from the room. People instantly became tired, began to yawn, to stop talking, laughing, dancing. The singer sat down. There was a sense of fatigue and depression about us.

The magic was gone.

The scene revealed itself for what it was. The coloured lamps became, again, coloured bottles with lights in them. The tinsel resumed the look of cheap plastic cut into strips. The band became a tired collection of half-drunk amateurs. The dresses of the women returned to their mis-matched shabby cotton garments with paper flowers attached. The real flowers in their hair wilted and drooped. Their hair fell dishevelled over their tired careworn faces.

I asked Doc if he had noted the change. He nodded. We picked up a bottle of tequila and wandered off to sit outside with one of the old men who, for reasons of his own, had decided not to attend the party. As we sat, we shared our bottle with him.

‘I saw it,’ said the old man.

We both looked at him. The hall, he told us, was a bad place, a haunted place. Un lugar embrujado. Not right for a fiesta. It should have been burned down and nothing taken from it. Not that it was the materials themselves which were bad but the spot where they had been placed. That area had always been an avoided place, he said. When there had been no building on it the animals would not graze there. Nobody placed a shack there and lived in it for more than a few nights. The depot, which had been built at such great expense, closed down after only four months. Doc wondered if it was something in the ground. The old man nodded. In a manner of speaking, he said. But it wasn’t so much the ground. The area was like a doorway, he tried to explain, an entrance were malign forces were concentrated and able to enter this world – whether from above or below... who knew? The old man couldn’t really explain himself further than that.

Doc said he had heard and read of such things before. Some believed that there where areas of energy in the earth and, where these lines of energy crossed, varying affects were experienced. Some claimed they could be areas of great healing which is why many standing stones are found at such spots. It is often discovered that a Christian holy place, such as St Paul's Cathedral in London, has been built on the site of a pagan temple, and that temple built on the spot of a spring or stone which had always been considered sacred and of beneficial power. But the opposite can also be the case. That an area can have a malign influence, that things are seen and felt at such spots which have a great difficulty in revealing themselves elsewhere. Some areas seem to give energy, while other areas seem to take it.

But what happened that night?

Perhaps some force which might be interpreted as an entity which feeds on energy drained the energy from the fiesta. Everyone has known of people capable of such a thing. There is a warm gathering in a pub, a home, anywhere people are mixing freely, chatting, drinking, laughing, and then... some person joins them. The mood is gone. The atmosphere entirely changed. That person has drained all vitality from the room as a vampire drains the vitality from its victim. Perhaps we experienced such a thing that night only on a grander scale. Or perhaps, Doc speculated sometime after, the negative energy of the area allowed for the coalescence of the dark side of human nature, that the area where the fiesta took place, due to its underground currents of energy or energy absorption, facilitated a materialisation of the dark thoughts of the crowd – lethargy, despair, depression, disillusionment, pessimism. Doc firmly believes that some areas – for whatever reason – hold such malign influence, just as other areas hold a benign influence, and just because we can’t measure such things with instruments is no more proof that they don’t exist than a claim that microbes didn’t exist before the microscope.

The next morning, I woke with a ferocious hangover to the sound of a great commotion. The disused depot where the party had been held was on fire. No one was making much of an effort to put the fire out. I saw Doc sitting by the old man we had spoken to, sharing a smoke and a drink. They had been up all night and both had a smile on their drunken faces like a pair of... like a pair of happy arsonists, perhaps.

            Is it possible that the site of the Monte Vista is such a spot as the South American depot but on a lesser scale? Or again, perhaps John Wayne suggested the ghost story to the management as a marketing ploy.

In celebration of Benny Hill

For those of you not old enough to remember, Benny Hill was an incredibly popular English TV comedian with his own eponymous show which ran from the 1960s and into the late 80s before his brand of comedy became unfashionable and the show was cancelled. When I say it became unfashionable, it was not unfashionable with his audience and was still one of the most watched shows on British TV – and American. In fact, it is still broadcast and very popular in the United States, Spain, Italy and many South American countries. It became unfashionable with those who are arrogant enough to dictate to others what they believe is tasteful. It is a modern form of puritanism and assumes an ignorance and stupidity in those whom they would dictate to.

Much of Benny Hill’s comedy was crude but that can be said of a great deal of comedy, apart, of course, from Laurel & Hardy. Am impure thought, I am sure, never entered the head of Stan and Ollie’s characters. Think of the Marx Brothers, with Groucho’s leering, Harpo chasing after screaming chamber-maids, and Chico with a woman locked in a cupboard. Chaplin too (a fan of Benny Hill), in real life and in his films, had a preference for what would now be considered suspiciously young girls/women. In England, the Carry On films had comedy far cruder than anything Benny Hill portrayed, and the history of such humour is long in Britain. Take one of Max Miller’s jokes for instance:

‘I went on holiday to the mountains. I was walking across a very narrow path when I saw this beautiful young women coming towards me. Well… I didn’t know whether to block her passage or toss myself off!’

And that was in the 1940s.

And then there’s George Formby with his Little Stick of Blackpool Rock. ‘It may be sticky but I never complain, it's nice to have a nibble at it now and again.’

Hill was very much of the music hall tradition and his comedy was definitely crude but some of it was genius. One sketch in particular would not be out of place in the pantheon of great visual comedy moments. Benny Hill, as his clown character on a darkened stage, begins to do a striptease. The gloves come off, the clothes come off… and, after the clothes, the skin comes off until all that is left is a skeleton shaking its bones in time to David Rose’s The Stripper… then the bones fly away. The striptease is taken to its logical absurdist conclusion. If Dali and Bunuel had included the scene in L’Age d’Or academics would have been ecstatic over it. But it was only Benny Hill. Watch it for yourself.  

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xgoi9t

Have you seen the light?

Sunlight: Robert Delauney

For sunlight to be photographed or painted it must be photographed or painted indirectly, through its effect on something. The French artist Robert Delauney had a studio in the living room of his home. He put shutters over the window to transform it into a darkroom during the day. Into the shutter he drilled a small hole. Now he was ready to study sunlight. He had prepared his canvas and ground his own colours. A tiny ray of light filtered into the room. He began to paint it, studying it, analysing its form, colours, components. He was attempting to study pure light, solar light. He had divested art of subject matter. Light was his subject. Slowly, after weeks, months, he enlarged the hole, little by little. Then he would paint the play of light on a transparent material. His canvases came to look like jewel cases and, in fact, he began to grind precious stones for the colours he used. Eventually the hole became so wide that it was no longer practical. He opened the shutters and the world of light flowed in. From the play of light in a sunbeam he began painting the explosion of light all over Paris.

William Burroughs is an author I very much admire, but that doesn't hinder my realisation that every now and again he talks shit in a very pontifical manner. Burroughs was at heart a puritan but that is a subject for another time. He once used the expression, ‘as banal as sunlight’. I find nothing banal in sunlight. Many artists have turned from the object which the light has delineated to the light itself. Edward Hopper once said that he believed there was something inhuman about himself. Rather than paint pictures of people grimacing and gesticulating, as he put it, he would rather paint sunlight on a wall, something he did very often. In fact, one of my favourite paintings of Hopper's is of an empty room with sunlight pouring in an open door. It is called Rooms by the Sea. Originally he had called it The Stepping Off Point. He was said to have changed the title because he was told it was suggestive of suicide. Hopper was prone to bleak moods and melancholy. Hopper was observer, not a participant. He reminds me of the Danish artist Wilhelm Hammershoi, another quiet observer. Hammershoi liked to paint people from behind or with their faces lowered, hidden in shade. This is another trait of Hopper's. Hopper, like de Chirico, loved views of low sunlight on buildings and the shadows they cast and a number of Hopper’s paintings remind me of de Chirico – the buildings, the street views, the low sunlight and long shadows. 

The Stepping Off Point - Hopper

            J.M.W Turner was also fascinated by sunlight until eventually his paintings became almost abstract in their play of light in different atmospheric conditions. One of his paintings was called Study of Sunlight. Others were The Sun Reflected on the Sea and Sun Rising Through Vapour.  He once said, ‘The Sun is God’  and he was a devotee of staring at the sun directly with the naked eye, which, in his time, was reputed to relax the eyes. It Turner’s case it resulted in what is known as ‘glassblower’s cataract’. Another side-effect of staring at the sun is that it would have limited his perception of the colour yellow, causing him to over-use the colour in order for him to see it as clearly as he once did. A great many of his paintings have yellow in them, lots of yellow, and for a time he was called the ‘Yellow Dwarf’. There is a cartoon of a very small Turner standing before a canvas about to paint with a large dripping mop in his hand and a bucket labelled Yellow. Turner’s fascination with the sun itself, rather than what it illuminated, occurred at the same time of William Herschel’s lecture at the Royal Society in which he argued that the sun was at the centre of the solar system, a ‘physical entity’ with ‘openings, shallows, ridges, nodules, corrugations, indentations and pores’. Herschel’s lecture caused a sensation. Not long afterwards Turner began to paint solid suns, not just impressions of bright, circular, radiating light, but what Herschel called a ‘solid globe of unignited matter’.

A lot of yellow by Turner.

These days, of course, light illuminates in more than one way. It is used to convey information. Light is any electromagnetic wave across the whole EM spectrum and includes visible light, radio waves, microwaves, infrared, ultraviolet, x-rays, and gamma rays. All of these things are light waves to a physicist. Each of them has a different wavelength and frequency (or colour), but they're all electromagnetic waves. A fibre-optic cable is a wire containing transparent materials that carry light. The outside of the cable contains a material that will reflect the light, keeping it moving along the length of the cable. Digital information is sent through these cables using light pulses. A strong pulse of light indicates a one, and no pulse indicates a zero. Through rapid changes in the light, you can send highly complex signals down the cable. These are most often used either for high speed internet connections, or for sending sound signals to home-entertainment systems. Usually, infrared signals are sent along these fibre optic cables since these kinds of waves spread out the least and, thereby, lose the least amount of data during transmission. Infrared can also be used without a cable. The most common everyday example of this is a remote control.

If you shatter a holographic image every piece, no matter how small, contains enough information to recreate the entire image, though with less information as the pieces get smaller. A holographic image is a standing wave pattern, or interference pattern, of light waves. In physics, of course, light is characterised as being both a particle and a wave. It is quantized into small energy packets called photons that travel through space at… the speed of light. 186,282 miles per second. That seems pretty fast but on the scale of the universe it’s slow. If the sun were suddenly to disappear, we wouldn’t know about it for eight minutes, which is the length of time it takes for sunlight to reach us. A light we see from a galaxy ten million light-years away is ten million years old. The cosmic field of light is really an asynchronous flow of electromagnetic waves converging at every point to create standing wave patterns. That means, when you look up at the night sky you are looking at a field of light where everything which appears  to your eyes at that precise moment of your time is a collage of light in which every point began its journey at a different time from every other point. It is like being in a gallery which has paintings of many different periods, they might have been painted at any time within the past five hundred years but they are all appearing to you now in your present time. The photons that are emitted from every source (whether as radiation from stars, or as reflection from planets) are carrying information about the source itself – that is, its location in space and time, its colours and temperatures, its atomic and molecular composition, its speed of rotation and direction of movement. The light field is a field of information. Light carries information in its photons. David Bohm said there is meaning at every level of existence, from the quantum to the macrocosmic. ‘From this perspective,’ said Bohm, ‘the particle [i.e. electron] would seem to be gathering information about its environment and responding according to the meaning of the information.'

Have you seen the light?

Philip K. Dick believed that light carried information, that is, it literally carried information. Not that 'it was like' a signal but 'it was' a signal being sent in the form of light with a message to be received. He wasn't the only receiver. Everyone, he believed, was a potential receiver, much as any TV might potentially receive any signal. But whether or not the signal was picked up depended upon the sensitivity of the receiver and also whether the receiver tuned in or dismissed the signal as something they did not want to receive, or was not worth receiving. In this way, Dick believed he was receiving his stories, which was why his stories often related to future happenings. For instance, in Flow My Tears Dick wrote a 19-year-old girl called Kathy. As he describes her; 'She is a girl of the gutter... living a quasi-illegal existence.' The year after the book was published, he met a girl of the same age, living the same existence, 'living a life so similar to that of the girl in the novel as to frighten me... Her name - Kathy.' Dick has a theory for such things which relates to the concept of tachyons. Tachyons are theorised to be particles of cosmic origin which fly faster than light and consequently in a reversed time direction. Arthur Koestler, from whom Dick picked up the notion, speculates that they would 'carry information from the future into our present, as light and X-rays from distant galaxies carry information from the remote past into our now and here. In the light of these developments, we can no longer exclude on a priori grounds the theoretical possibility of precognitive phenomena.' (Harper's, July 1974)

Dick believed this was nothing new. What was new was having a scientific framework with which to describe it. Prior to the tachyon theory the reception of these messages would have suggested a mystical contact with a transmundane or alien god who can communicate in the form of a ray of light. The blinding light of the epiphany which Saul received on the road to Damascus, for instance. The moment of illumination when the long-sought solution to a problem is suddenly revealed. We can call it many things; ESP, precognition, instinctual awareness, a message from the subconscious - which, as Dick says, suggests the question; What is the subconscious? Without the scientific framework to describe the experience he would have had to declare, 'God has shown me!' Considering the distance these units of information travel, their velocity, the contamination and signal-loss that might be experienced, it is inevitable, thought Dick, that much information is lost or misinterpreted, like the mistyping of a message when one is in a hurry or not paying complete attention to what is being transcribed. Not everyone is an adept at transduction as is a mystic or a saint.

Dick was not the only one who believed he was receiving messages or that he was writing future events. In what many people took as a typical Dalinian mystification, Salvador Dali said the points of his moustache were antennae receiving cosmic messages which inspired his painting. The neglected Arthur Machen said many of his stories contained elements which 'became real' in the future. In his autobiography he notes that after writing Three Imposters he met with people exactly like the characters he had written who offered him advice. William Burroughs believed that the purpose of a writer was to write the future and that he also was a vehicle for messages received. When Norman Mailer said of Burroughs that he was possessed of genius, Burroughs said Mailer had used the correct terminology - not that he 'was' a genius, but that he was 'possessed' by genius which might come and go as it wished. Burroughs believed that all artists had to leave themselves open to influences and that such openness was dangerous because you never knew exactly what you might be letting in. All artists, of whatever variety, for Burroughs, were vehicles of such decoding, some better at it than others. In his short essay on Hemingway, Burroughs notes that 'Hemingway wrote his life and death so closely that he had to be stopped before he found out what he was doing and wrote about that.... He who writes death as the pilot of a small plane in Africa should beware of small planes in Africa, especially in the vicinity of Kilimanjaro. But it was written and he stepped right into his own writing. The brain damage he sustained... led to a hopeless depression and eventually his suicide.'

Dick came to wonder if he wasn't actually living in one of his own stories, or that by writing about his environment, his reality, he was changing it as the physicist changes the quantum event by attempting to measure it. Burroughs had a similar belief that what we posit onto the universe is reflected back to us, this proving its reality, that is, confirming our interpretation. But we put it there in the first place. Therefore, by writing it, by believing it, by thinking it, we create it - the 'creative observer' is a term frequently used by Robert Anton Wilson. Dick worried that speculation of this sort might lead to solipsism.

Dick asked the question, 'What is our subconscious?' For Jung, there was the individual unconscious consisting of unconscious events particular to the individual and relating to their lifetime, and the collective unconscious, an unconscious shared by the race and formed by many millennia of accumulated racial experience. An individual or a people might become energised by archetypes of the collective unconscious, literally receiving information from it which leads to action. Jung's notion is similar to Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere. For Chardin there is the geo-sphere, the bio-sphere and the noosphere. The noosphere might be described as the realm of spirit or thought, not of collective unconsciousness but of collective consciousness. It is this greater consciousness that Chardin believes to be the evolutionary goal of humans. Rather than tachyons carrying information from great distances, might it not be that the noosphere, the collective unconscious, the morphic field, whatever you might wish to call it, is a field of information all around us, something capable of being accessed by humans and other animals, the information received being relative to the species and the abilities of that species? What of the near- death experience of the tunnel of light? When the individual dies, might it be akin to an uploading of their individual experience to the information field, to be utilized by future generations? Dick has suggested things a lot stranger. If this information field functions at the quantum level then it might be 'out of time', not subject to sequential laws as we experience them. Dick wrote: 'I feel I have been a lot of different people. Many people have sat at this typewriter, using my fingers. Writing my books.' This reminds me of Nietzsche, who said, 'I am all the names in history.'

It's cosmic, man.

'I must conclude,' said Dick, 'that my or perhaps even our collective environment is only a pseudo-environment.... Maybe getting other people to read my writing I change reality by their reading it and expecting it to be like my books.' Anomalies were something Dick used in Ubik to prove to his characters their environment was not real. He then discovered the same anomalies happening to him in real life. He was in good company there. Charles Fort was a man also interested in anomalies, the anomalies that science attempts to ignore but which will not go away. There is a logical possibility that we are characters in the pseudo-environment of a computer simulation or something similar. Perhaps we are characters within a simulation, within a simulation, within... etc. Ad infinitum.  There is though, always the possibility that the beams of light which Dick experienced were repeated transient ischemic attacks, or temporary strokes. It was a stroke that finally killed him. If it was a series of small strokes, the changes to his personality suggest that the neural circuitry associated with his conscious mind was reconfigured, something which is often witnessed in a particular type of stroke when, for instance, an individual with no prior appreciation of art suddenly because obsessed with painting, taking art lessons, visiting galleries, collecting a library of art books. The same has happened with food, people never before cooking anything other than a tin of beans suddenly becoming fascinated by cooking to the point of mortgaging their homes to own restaurants. The literature on such changes is prolific. My father had a stroke which was relatively minor. It had a curious side-effect though, in that he suddenly found everything hilariously funny. One of the best laughs I have ever had in my life was when I sat beside his sick bed at the Western Infirmary in Glasgow. Neither of us could say a word without the other killing themselves laughing. We got some very strange looks from the other patients and their visitors. The opposite, though, is also true. Another man in another room found everything intensely sad and upsetting. His daughter appeared one evening and said, 'I've brought you the paper.' He began bawling his eyes out. The theologian Rudolph Otto once said, 'Do we not rather experience ourselves than command ourselves?' Jean Cocteau is reported to have said on awakening every morning; 'There is nothing you can do about it: submit...' I submit and experience myself.

A friend of mine had a recipe for what he claimed was the perfect dry martini. I suspect he stole the recipe from Louis Bunuel. His recipe included sunlight. Ice would be placed in a frozen glass, four drops of Angostura Bitters would be added, a splash of Vermouth and then the gin. The crucial part was the gin. First it had to be poured separately into a glass and then the glass placed in direct sunlight in order that the sun’s rays should pass through the gin. Only then was the gin added to the main glass. Was there any reason for this? Of course, he said. The sunlight purifies the gin, the miniscule doses of radiation killing off certain toxins in the alcohol which cause the maudlin melancholy often associated with gin drinking.

I never tried his recipe. I don’t like gin.

The same friend had another theory regarding a famous painting by Vermeer. The painting was once called Woman Weighing Gold until it was realised that the balance in her hand is empty. Then the name was changed to Woman Holding Balance, or Woman Testing Balance. Not everyone agrees the balance is empty. Some believe it shows the woman weighing pearls against gold – except my friend, who believes that the scales are neither empty nor is she weighing any precious materials. Or, rather, she is weighing a precious material of a different sort. I have come around to his way of thinking. Find the best reproduction of the painting you can. Get yourself a magnifying glass. Look at the scales. There appears to be nothing on them. But there is something on them. Two areas, one on each plate of the scales, has a portion of white paint. It was once thought that these might be pearls – and some still claim they are - until cleaning of the painting revealed them to be two areas highlighted by the sun entering the room from the upper left. My friend was of the opinion that the woman is weighing sunlight. The painting behind the woman was once so dark as to be barely discernible but the same cleaning which revealed the pearls of light also revealed the image. It is a Last Judgement. Some critics took this to be a comment on the vanity of the worldly-goods on the table before the woman; the gold, silver, pearl, bracelets, bangles, chains; ‘… everything that mortal man tries to hold on to.’ But the woman is perfectly serene. There is no indication of decay, death, dissolution. She has a calm equanimity. She is - why not - well-balanced. The Last Judgement also indicates something more than apocalyptic devastation. There is a famous Dutch painting by a predecessor of Vermeer’s, Rogier van der Weyden. It is a Last Judgement which focuses on St. Michael, weighing souls. He stands with a balance in his hand and his fingers raised delicately, as though he were sipping tea, just like the woman in the Vermeer. Souls have often been associated with light – the beam of light which departs the recently deceased being their soul ascending to heaven, and also with the luminous angels. But my friend didn’t believe the light on the scales represented any of these things. The light represented light. It was as precious to Vermeer, and any painter, as the materials on the table. It was something so common as to be taken for granted but which, it goes without saying, is absolutely essential. Let there be light. Light is the condition of life. Without light no life.

Vermeer was also reliant on the particular characteristics of light for the quality of his work, which Dali called hand-painted photographs. This wasn’t just Dali pointing out the photographic verisimilitude of Vermeer’s work. He was indicating the process by which Vermeer’s painting were created. It is generally accepted now by art historians that Vermeer used a camera obscura. The camera obscura functions on the same principle as a camera and they have been popular with painters since the later part of the 16^th century. A natural optical-phenomena occurs when a small hole is made on a screen splitting a room in two, one side of which is completely dark. The image from the lit side of the room is then reproduced in the dark wall of the opposite room, upside down. The artists can then trace the image perfectly onto canvas or paper. A hand-painted photograph. I am certain Dali used the same principle by projecting photographs onto canvas and then painting them. I once heard someone call this ‘cheating’ but artists have always made use of whatever technology is available. It is not the technique that matters but the conception of the image. And speaking of conception, in various obscure branches of Catholic theology it was once stated that Mary’s virgin birth was facilitated by a beam of light. She was, quite literally, impregnated by a divine light. There are a lot of odd theories on the go these days and one of them claims that Mary’s impregnation by a beam of light indicates that she was made pregnant by aliens who routinely interfere in human affairs to guide the human race to its appointed destiny, and one of their methods is to introduce great men and women into the gene-pool every now and again, such as Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, and others of a less religious nature such as Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. According to Philip K. Dick's theory, they wouldn't have to go to the trouble of interfering with the gene-pool or introducing alien-human hybrids. They would just have to find a suitable receptacle for their light signals - Eureka! 

So much for the banality of sunlight.