SUMMER READING

For some reason – related to the enemy below lending me the first two seasons of the X-files to me to watch – I’ve found myself reading either paranormal/ speculative books I have meant to read (THE SIRIUS MYSTERY ) or ones that I’ve read some time ago.

Just finished F.W. Holiday’s SERPENTS OF THE SKY DRAGONS OF THE EARTH – and well. I guess I have to be getting older or something but the book's off the mark. His main point is that Bronze Age Man worshiped UFO’s and Lake Monsters. In his terms the dragon and the disc (Which was the original title for the book).

I don’t have much of problem with this as a possibility. As far as I have been able to tell people have been seeing odd things in the sky and weird things in the deep lakes of the world for as long as there have been people. That being the case, treating this in a religious manner would not be surprising, given human nature. Hell we’ll worship anything – I hear there is a real church of Elvis out there somewhere, not a joke web site but really worshiping the man – so doing that wouldn’t be out of the question.

The trouble here is that Holiday tosses all sorts of completely irrelevant junk into the book –IN one chapter, he goes of on Darwin for some reason. This came while he was talking about lake monsters (Loch Ness et all) and it just came out of left field. IT HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THE MATTER AT HAND. And had the unfortunate effect of undermining the rest of the work. Nothing is going to get you labeled a lunatic crank quicker than bitching about Darwin’s theory of evolution – except maybe talking about Atlantis (we’ll get to that some other time). His major objection seems to be that Darwin doesn’t explain the origin of life; well sorry that wasn’t what he was trying to do. That’s like rejecting Quantum Theory because it doesn’t talk about Gravity. All Scientific theories are by their nature limited. Dwain proposed an underlying mechanism to explain existing facts (Species arise, continue then go extinct.). Holiday cites some well debunked hoo-haw about how human foot prints were found along side dinosaur footprints. I saw a picture one time – damn stones weren’t even the same color and there is a suspicion that the human looking foot prints were helped along by someone with a chisel.

Then later in the book – when discussing the nature of the UFO, real, par-physical, some kind of link to higher reality he goes off again about the Cottingley Fairy pictures and pretty much sinks any hope of someone ever taking the book seriously. Between 1917 and 1920 two young girls (last name Wright) claimed to have seen and have taken photographs of what they called fairies. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by this time in his live a devout spiritualist believed fully in the authenticity of the pictures. As did many others, including I guess Mr. Holiday.

The only trouble is they were fake – years later the girls admitted they were fakes. One girl claimed that they actually did see fairies in the fields but even she admitted the pictures were fake. And they are painfully fake – maybe it’s just we so much more visually aware of photographic trickery than they were but heavens above – the damn fairies are cut outs – a blind man could see it. But the need to believe is strong in man – and will very often disregard anything that it doesn’t want to hear. The present nightmare in Iraq is one example and on a much small scale my romantic disasters (No she’s not going to dump me, just because she doesn’t return my calls or want to see me as much or sleep with me anymore, no it’s just a phase we’re going through) are ample proof of that. So you have Holiday following in Doyle’s embarrassing footprints.

And the sad thing is it had nothing to do with Holiday’s central idea – not a one, he just stuck it in there and off he went.

Very disappointing.