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Colin Bennett Anomalies

Putting the Noise Back into the System

Cargo Cults and warring advertising systems epitomise our human cognition of UFOs.

9/11: Charles Fort's Take.

To our current world-structure maimed by anomalies, let us apply Story Technology and a Theory of Explanations: here, to the mysterious questions raised by 9/11. UFO magazine, August 2007

Child Brides From Outer Space

The radical Exopolitical movement claims humanoid aliens move freely among us. These original foil-hats now have the attention of influential culture warriors. But really, Exopolitics is a post-modern, meme-based, prototypal entertainment system.
Reality Uncovered, May 2010

Meme Wars: We Have an Agenda

Isaac Caret's UFO pictures document a new form of provocative mythological engineering, far beyond the grasp of the "Victorian Station Masters" whose values dominate Old Ufology. realityuncovered.net

Lee Harvey Oswald as Fortean Man

Fifty years on, we still can't put together a single “factually correct” 24-hour frame of a single Lee Harvey Oswald day. It shows that, the deeper we enter a system, the more complicated it becomes, as if it doesn't want to be observed too closely. Politics of the Imagination, 2002

From Cover Girl to Cold War Spy

Candy Jones was one of the most successful American Fashion Models of the 1940s—but she led a secret life as a Manchurian candidate-style agent for the US Intelligence Services during the Cold War. A story of multiple personality, conspiracy, hypnotic mind-control, and fantasy life. Fortean Times, July 2001

Deconstruction of the B-29

A wrecked B-29 in the Pacific is a crashed sample of "Product Time" from our almost-recent past. But also, the fractured shapes of the bomber are interwoven with the plots of consumerism, technology, and that new advanced life-form, the cultural advertisement. Flying Saucers over the White House, 2010

Managing Mystery

Of the rampaging ideological viruses of our century, why has the story of Vera the Alien not fertilised as successfully as Jesus walking on water, or the esoteric yarns of nuclear physics? Because pure advertisement-stuff is all that's left to us to operate as spirit. What results are Story Technology, and systems of Wonder Management - "story-jumps", "fast transients", "evidence games" and cultural vanishing by empirical re-scaling. UFO Magazine, August 2006

Cosmology: Science as Showbusiness

The New Cosmology contained cosmological gulps that 30 years earlier rigorous science would have professionally crucified. In the wake of scandal and environmental crime, Science is desperately re-advertising itself. Fortean Times, June 1994

Skepticism as Mystique

Our bloodiest cultural war is not between the old industrial fact and fiction, but between different kinds of socially controlled, transforming mystique. UFO Magazine, December 2006

The Alien is Under Construction

The Fortean, or postmodern view: the claim for the “reality” of Orthon, the man from Venus, is neither “true” nor “false,” but is an intermediate form of information: a "liminal", or a "half-form". Paranoia, The Conspiracy Reader, Winter 2006

Objectivity Means You Have Not Done What You Have Just Done

UFO magazine No 11

A Late Disciple of Lucretius

Roman philosopher Titus Lucretius Carus (c. 99–55BC) invented the scientific method. Charles Fort was notoriously "the foe of science". But still, their thinking overlaps strikingly. Both champion the underrated role of imagination in producing the major systems of philosophy. To both, the truth is an unstable locus between transient systems of complex cultural advertisements. Philosophy Now, October 2002

Rocket in His Pocket: Jack Parsons

Jack Parsons, a founding father of American rocket-science, was a character strung between Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac, and the Devil himself. Bennett considers the short but remarkable life of a blazing star. Fortean Times, March 2000

Mothman: Invasion of the Doll People

John Keel’s The Mothman Prophecies (1975)—stands with John Michell’s Flying Saucer Vision (1967), Patrick Harpur’s Daimonic Reality (1994), and Anthony “Doc” Shiels’ Monstrum (1990) as a modern masterpiece that reimagines our place in the world. It points to ancient magical connections between Mind and Landscape, the antithesis of the godless “objectivity” of a sterile materialist culture. Fortean Times, March 2002

Weaponising the Narrative

In a world, now composed almost entirely of simulations, there is a new form of life: the cultural advertisement. Mind and thought can now be conceived as forms of ever-evolving mass media rather than mechanistic psychologies with hard differentials and finite inputs and outputs. UFO Magazine, June 2012

Recipe for a Universe

Fortean Times, October 2000