Review: The Ghost of 29 Megacycles

Fuller, John G., The Ghost of 29 Megacycles, Souvenir Press Ltd., London, 1985.

Octavo; hardcover, with silver-gilt spine-titling; 257pp. Near fine in like dustwrapper, now protected by archival–quality non-adhesive plastic film.

I’m only halfway through this at the moment but I’ve already got up such a head of steam that I need to de-pressurise a bit before I go on. This is a book about technology being used to determine if there are ghosts out there; about science going head-to-head with “things beyond the veil”, and I had high hopes of a satisfying conclusion.

It’s not that I have a superstitious mind, or that I believe prima facie in the supernatural: when I was a kid, like a lot of kids, I wanted magic and spooks and monsters to be real. Too often I found that exploring the world for the supernatural led to pat answers about how “magical” the world is, if you look at it in just the right way; that is, if you use your imagination and play nicely. Not satisfying. I was reading about actual monsters - werewolves being hunted through the villages of 16^th Century France; the Amityville Horror; UFOs and the Bermuda Triangle: I didn’t want someone at the end of the show saying “how much fun was that? See what we can do if we all play the same imaginary games?” Going through all of the cut-and-thrust, only to be told what a great, fictional story it all is, was the ultimate cop-out to my 8-year-old way of thinking.

This attitude remains with me today. I don’t mind following through on an investigation only to find out that some phenomenon is the result of creaky floorboards, glowing marsh gas and a few over-active imaginations; I don’t mind the Scooby-Doo ending if it’s reached intelligently and logically; however, I REALLY dislike being dragged through a narrative, hooked along by someone else’s poor assumptions.

This I think is one of the reasons I like Charles Fort (what he stood for anyway; not his writing style). His basic premise is that too often, in any field of human endeavour, people become blinkered by their assumptions about what ought to be happening and refuse to look at what’s actually going on. His main target was the scientific community which, having structured itself in such a way as to discount anything which doesn’t fall within its consensus-backed, peer-reviewed parameters, refuses to even look at anything anomalous. To this end he wrote (turgid, poorly-expressed, incendiary, convoluted) lists of anything that was out of the ordinary, so that it stood on record until such a time that science advanced far enough to be able to understand what had been going on. Fort didn’t have any answers; what he did have was a bee in his bonnet about people who refused to lift their heads up and look around.

The thing that really griped Fort’s cookies was that the scientific community claimed to have all of the answers. It annoyed him that Science, when confronted with the Unknown, often declared in a patronising manner “there has to be a rational explanation”, without then going on to provide one. Discount and move on: this seemed to him to be Science’s standard operating procedure. There are echoes of Fort’s annoyance in every episode of the X-Files, where Government deniability swoops in to conceal, appropriate and cover-up anything that seems strange and unusual. Fox Mulder: the modern-day Charles Fort.

So, I thought this book would be something a little refreshing: the scientific community setting out seriously to discover the nature of Life After Death.

The story is as follows: a well-known industrial engineer named Meeks, a staunch member of the scientific community, approaches our author to ask him to write an unbiased, impartial record of his discoveries in finding a method to communicate with the Dead. This scientist claims to have found a way to get ghosts to communicate with the living through an extension of principles outlined as EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena), working with the spirits of dead scientists to refine the process. It sounded pretty whacky to me (as it would to anyone really) but I decided to take the ride and see where it took me.

The book started off with many authorial assertions from Fuller that he was unwilling to take on the task, that he found the whole thing too preposterous. This was followed by claims to have researched all of the people involved, to see if they were members of the lunatic fringe (and thus to be avoided). Then we had the face-to-face meeting where we were told that everyone present was “normal” and earnest, in no way fruity or demonstrably unhinged. Meeks and his wife meet Fuller and his wife and they discuss the project over tea: Meeks is calm of aspect, steadfast in his beliefs, engaging in manner. The wives are supportive and engaged on both sides of the equation, and we get some homey exchanges of dialogue between Fuller and his missus about what the project entails and where it’s going.

It took less than this much to make my “baloney senses” start tingling.

Arguably, it’s my Gen-X attitudes showing, but when anyone tries this hard to convince me that everything’s OK, I automatically start picking at the cracks. The book to this point followed a well-trod path of deflecting suspicion and reservation: I was being asked not to harbour a feeling that anything other than what I was being told was going on. Strike one: I don’t like being told what to think, and I can see a soft-soap job coming a mile off.

We next had chapters of background, both of Meeks and Fuller, specifically, his past books which rang like self-promotion and advertising. To be frank, it was boring and I kept wanting him get to the punchline. Eventually, we started to hear about Meeks’s initial experiments wherein a cabal of technicians gathered regularly in a rented room with some hard-core audio and other electronic equipment to download information from the Afterlife, in the company of a medium.

What? A medium?

Here’s where the fantasy unravels: we’re told that our scientific researchers are wary of accepting the evidence of spirits from The Other Side, but that the main tentpole of their investigation is a crystal-ball-gazing, tarot-card-shuffling medium. Sorry: given that the presence of the one automatically assumes the fact of the other, as far as scientific method goes this is shooting itself in the foot from the get-go.

Further assertions of serious attitude follow: we’re told that the experiments begin with an earnest prayer; that the medium is not some gypsy-descended fruitcake, but is a reluctant acknowledger of the “gifts” they have been imbued with. Really? Seriously, they could be prayers to Satan at the start of a Black Mass for all I care, it just says that there’s all kinds of bias going on here, not just the taking for granted that dead people live on after “moving on”.

But wait: there’s more. Meeks tells us that, after many sessions tweaking an oscilloscope and twitching a metaphorical cat’s whisker, he has discovered that people “over there” live a life of pure thought and spiritual development; some people arrive less-than-perfectly adapted and must be schooled in ascending to higher grades of spiritual excellence. “Life” is spent enjoying the prospect of mental and spiritual attunement, passing on to higher states of phantasmagorical excellence. And there are scientists over there working night and day to find ways of communicating with their loved ones.

Come On! Seriously? Despite the fact that it all sounds mind-bogglingly tedious, has anyone else noticed that all of this material is being made available by one single individual whose “abilities” are assumed, cannot be measured or quantified, and are probably pure hogwash? Well, Meeks and his cabal of serious-minded researchers certainly have no problems with this, and Fuller is keen to make sure that we readers don’t either.

(Insert here the sound of a book flying across the room to bounce off a wall.)

This is no journalistic effort: it’s crap. Fuller’s assumptions – which he may have been sold on by Meeks – are creaky and don’t hold up to any reasonable examination. The premise that mediums exist, that psychic energies swirl around us and can be manipulated by schooled, talented individuals, is not a given, so any “research” which takes off from this premise is necessarily flawed and untenable. Let’s not even mention that a lead chapter outlining the author’s other literary efforts reeks of self-promotion and warns that this entire effort is likely to be an exercise in unit-shifting rather than revelation. Oh, did I just mention that? My bad.

I feel, like Fort, that I shouldn’t be judgemental and that I should keep an open mind about the assertions here. However, I’m not an idiot: the world has rules and it has a lot of snake-oil salesmen. I’m prepared to be astonished by new discoveries, not to be made to swallow a line.

Forty years on, there are still no monsters, ghosts or UFOs; sadly, there are still a lot of bullshit shovelers.

No Tentacled Horrors for this con-job.

*****