Radio Replay - 27th July 2014

 
Could ghosts be 3D psychic recordings? 

 

Are humans the descendants of apes genetically modified by ancient astronauts? 

 

Was the Rendlesham Forest incident really a mind control experiment? 

 

Just some of the topics touched on in this interesting discussion.

Nigel Kneale - Richard's Room 101

Born on the Isle of Man, Nigel Kneale was a writer active in television, film, radio drama, and prose fiction. He wrote professionally for over fifty years and was, in many ways, the father of serious science-fiction drama on television. Kneale’s most famous creation is the legendary Professor Bernard Quatermass, a heroic rocket scientist who saved humanity from a range of very different alien menaces in a trilogy of stories written by the Manx writer in the 1950s. 

   

The trilogy began with The Quatermass Experiment, in which the first-ever manned space rocket returns to Earth with two of the three astronauts on board missing and the third possessed by some kind of hostile alien organism. In time, this organism consumes and changes the last astronaut into something horrific: a creature that threatens to possess and consume all other life on Earth. However, Quatermass confronts the monster and, with a moving speech, reaches what is left of his friend's humanity, persuading him to sacrifice himself to save the rest of mankind.

   

In the next story, Quatermass II, the professor is asked to examine strange meteorite showers falling in rural England. His investigations lead to him discovering a vast conspiracy involving alien infiltration at the highest levels of the British Government. Somehow these aliens, who have a group consciousness similar to the Borg in Star Trek, can control the minds of people exposed to an alien parasite concealed in their meteorite-like projectiles. The aliens plan to colonise the Earth, but Quatermass manages to stop them by destroying their asteroid base in orbit, very sadly losing his close friend and colleague Dr. Pugh in the process. 

    

Finally, in the best and last story of the 1950s trilogy, Quatermass and the Pit, Quatermass becomes involved in the discovery of a strange object near some apemen remains that are millions of years old, at an archaeological dig in Knightsbridge, London. The odd object is first thought to be an unexploded World War II bomb, but then more apemen remains are found mysteriously inside the back of the object and later, more disturbingly, the decaying bodies of dead insect-like creatures are found inside the front. The object turns out to be a nuclear-powered spaceship, five million years old, the creatures: Martians and the apemen: their creations … us … the human race.

  

In the story, we learn that when Mars was dying, the ancient Martians had tried to create a colony on Earth by proxy. They altered mankind’s early ancestors, giving them minds and abilities like their own, but with a body adapted to Earth. More worryingly, they also passed on to mankind their genocidal instincts to destroy anyone different from themselves. In effect, making us the Martians now. Fortunately, the Martians died out before completing their plan, and, as humankind bred and further evolved, most outgrew their darker Martian inheritance.

  

Unfortunately, somehow the spaceship reawakens the old Martian instincts, transforming more and more people into genocidal Martians on a race purge, destroying anyone unaffected by the ship’s evil influence. However, Quatermass finds a way to stop the ethnic cleansing before the Martians turn the Earth into a second dead planet. He also tragically loses another friend in doing so.

  

   

  

In each of the three Quatermass stories, Kneale managed to tap into the popular interests and, more importantly, anxieties of the time. In The Quatermass Experiment, he played on the mass interest in the early space race and the new threat of nuclear war. The UK conducted the earliest post-war tests of captured Nazi V-2 rockets in Operation Backfire, less than six months after the war in Europe ended, and the development of a British launch system to carry a nuclear device started in 1950. So there was a real fear that one of these rockets could come falling out of the sky bringing with it destruction, as one does in The Quatermass Experiment. Then, in Quatermass II, before Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Kneale exploited the popular paranoia about the threat of communist infiltration and subversion of the West. Like nuclear war, this was a real fear at the time. For instance, in 1951, two members of the British establishment, Burgess and Maclean, had made international headlines by very publicly defecting to the Soviet Union. And, finally, with the Notting Hill race riots of 1958 still very much fresh in peoples' minds, Kneale wrote Quatermass and the Pit admittedly as a fable about race hate.

  

Kneale’s Quatermass trilogy clearly had a huge impact that continues to be felt even today, influencing everyone from Chris Carter to Gene Roddenberry. The Quatermass Experiment (1953) was the very first science fiction production to be written especially for an adult television audience and cleared the way for the many others that followed it. Also, the three basic alien invasion storylines were first pioneered on television by Kneale in the Quatermass stories. In The Quatermass Experiment, we go to the aliens and bring them back, in Quatermass II the aliens come to us, and in Quatermass and the Pit, we discover that the aliens were here all along.

  

But it would be a mistake to think that Nigel Kneale only wrote stories involving alien possession and invasion. An excellent example of this is The Abominable Snowman, a 1957 Hammer horror film based on Kneale’s own BBC television play The Creature. Again tapping into popular interest at the time, the film follows the exploits of an English anthropologist with an American expedition as they search the Himalayas for the legendary Yeti, the apemen of Tibet. In the real world, speculation about the existence of an unidentified creature living in the Himalayas had been sparked off in November 1951, when Eric Shipton and Michael Ward of the Everest Reconnaissance Expedition found several large footprints as they traversed the Menlung Glacier, and, two years later, Edmund Hillary made a similar discovery during his historic conquest of Mount Everest.

   

In the film, Kneale turns perceptions on their head by suggesting that the so-called Abominable Snowman is not so abominable at all and, perhaps, even a great deal better than mankind who turn out to be the real monsters. The central idea being that the Yeti are our collateral descendants from the apes and are patiently and peacefully waiting for mankind to destroy himself, either quickly through war or slowly through pollution, before descending from the mountains to inherit the Earth. 

  

Another excellent example is The Stone Tape, a Christmas ghost story from 1972 and Kneale’s last major original work for the BBC. Like Quatermass and the Pit before it (which suggested that poltergeist activity could be explained by the psychic abilities left to us by the Martians), The Stone Tape combined science fiction with the supernatural. The television play revolves around a group of scientists who move into a new research facility: an allegedly haunted Victorian mansion. Curious, they investigate the alleged ghost but soon determine that it is really just some kind of recording of a past event somehow stored by stone in one of the rooms (the stone tape of the title). Believing that this discovery may lead to the development of a whole new recording medium, which they were originally brought together to find in the first place, they throw all their knowledge and high-tech equipment into trying to find a means of playing back the stone tape recording at will. However, their investigations only serve to unleash a far older and more malevolent force, with tragic consequences. Of course, The Stone Tape is where “the stone tape theory” familiar to many paranormal researchers today originates. 

   

Kneale also wrote three excellent dystopian texts, a fourth Quatermass story The Quatermass Conclusion, a 1954 television adaptation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four for the BBC, and The Year of the Sex Olympics. It is the last of these that proved to be the most prophetic. Broadcast in 1968 The Year of the Sex Olympics seemed to accurately predict the creation of reality TV in the 1990s.

 

Set “sooner than you think” in the TV play society is divided between “low-drives” that receive no education and “hi-drives” who control the government and media. The low drives are controlled by a constant broadcast of pornography that the hi-drives believe will pacify them. But after the accidental death of a protester during the Sex Olympics gets a massive audience response, the authorities create a new TV programme, The Live Life Show. In the new show, a family is moved to a remote Scottish island while the low-drive audience watches. 

   

Hopefully, this goes some way to answering the question of who Nigel Kneale was. Of all the great science fiction writers to emerge from these islands since World War II, including the likes of Arthur C. Clarke, perhaps only Nigel Kneale comes anywhere close to matching H G. Wells in terms of lasting public impact and sheer brilliance. Both successfully tapped into the mass anxieties of their time and placed them at the centre of their stories, making science fiction accessible to the general public. In short, what Wells did for science fiction in print, Kneale did on television, clearing the way for intelligent science fiction drama on the small screen.

READ RICHARD'S ROOM 101 COLUMN FOR BINNALL OF AMERICA

Ghosts, Aliens, Yeti and the Late Great Nigel Kneale - Richard's Room 101

Who was Nigel Kneale?

This is the question that many readers are probably asking themselves right now, which is a real shame because, without the work of this great television pioneer, I highly doubt there would be much intelligent science fiction on television today. There probably would have never been a Doctor Who or X-Files and science fiction, on television at least, would in all likelihood still only be Saturday morning nonsense for little children and even littler minds.

So for those who are still wondering, who was Nigel Kneale?

  

Nigel Kneale (18 April 1922 – 29 October 2006) was a Manx (Isle of Man) writer, active in television, film, radio drama and prose fiction. He wrote professionally for over fifty years and was, in many ways, the father of serious science-fiction drama on television.

   

Kneale is best remembered today as the creator of his now-legendary character "Professor Bernard Quatermass." Quatermass was a heroic rocket scientist, kind of a prototype for Doctor Who, who saved humanity from a range of very different alien menaces in a trilogy of stories written by Kneale in the 1950s.

   

Kneale's Quatermass trilogy begins with The Quatermass Experiment, the first-ever manned space rocket returns to Earth with two of the three astronauts on board missing and the third possessed by some kind of hostile alien organism. In time, this organism consumes and changes the last astronaut into something horrific: a creature that threatens to possess and consume all other life on Earth. However, Quatermass confronts the monster and, with a moving speech, reaches what is left of his friend's humanity, persuading him to sacrifice himself to save the rest of mankind. 

  

In the next story, Quatermass II, Quatermass is asked to examine strange meteorite showers falling in rural England. His investigations lead to him discovering a vast conspiracy involving alien infiltration at the highest levels of the British and other major world governments. Somehow these aliens, who have a group consciousness similar to the "Borg" in Star Trek, can control the minds of people exposed to an alien parasite concealed in their meteorite-like projectiles. The aliens plan to colonise the Earth, but Quatermass manages to stop them by destroying their asteroid base in orbit, very sadly losing his close friend and colleague Dr Pugh in the process.

Finally, in the best and last story of the 1950s trilogy, Quatermass and the Pit, Quatermass becomes involved in the discovery of a strange object near some ape men remains millions of years old, at an archaeological dig in Knightsbridge, London. The odd object is first thought to be an unexploded World War II bomb, but then more ape men remain are found mysteriously inside the back of the object and later, more disturbingly, the decaying bodies of dead insect-like creatures are found inside the front. The object turns out to be a nuclear-powered spaceship, five million years old, the creatures: Martians and the ape-men: their creations ... us ... the human race.

  

It is revealed that when Mars was dying, the ancient Martians had tried to create a colony on Earth by proxy. They altered mankind's early ancestors, giving them minds and abilities like their own, but with a body adapted to Earth. More worrisome, they also passed on to mankind their genocidal instincts to destroy anyone different from themselves. In effect, making us the Martians now. Fortunately, the Martians died out before completing their plan and, as mankind bred and further evolved, most outgrew their darker Martian inheritance.

  

Unfortunately, somehow the spaceship reawakens the old Martian instincts, transforming more and more people into genocidal Martians on a race purge, destroying anyone unaffected by the ship's evil influence. However, Quatermass finds a way to stop the ethnic cleansing before the Martians turn the Earth into a second dead planet. He also tragically loses another friend in doing so. 

In each of the three Quatermass stories, Kneale managed to tap into the popular interests and, more importantly, anxieties of the time. In The Quatermass Experiment, he played on the mass interest in the early space race and the new threat of nuclear war. The UK conducted the earliest post-war tests of captured Nazi V-2 rockets in Operation Backfire, less than six months after the war in Europe ended, and the development of a British launch system to carry a nuclear device started in 1950. So there was a real fear that one of these rockets could come falling out of the sky bringing with it destruction, as one does in The Quatermass Experiment. Then, in Quatermass II, before Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Kneale exploited the popular paranoia about the threat of communist infiltration and subversion of the West. Like nuclear war, this was a real fear at the time. For instance, in 1951, two members of the British establishment, Burgess and Maclean, made international headlines by very publicly defecting to the Soviet Union. And, finally, with the Notting Hill race riots of 1958 still very much fresh in people's minds, Kneale wrote Quatermass and the Pit admittedly as a fable about race hate. 

  

Kneale's Quatermass trilogy clearly had a huge impact that continues to be felt even today, influencing everyone from Chris Carter to Stephen King. The Quatermass Experiment (1953) was the very first science fiction production to be written especially for an adult television audience and cleared the way for the many others that followed it. Also, the three basic alien invasion storylines were first pioneered on television by Kneale in the Quatermass stories. In The Quatermass Experiment, we go to the aliens and bring them back, in Quatermass II the aliens come to us, and in Quatermass and the Pit, we discover that the aliens were here all along.

  

But it would be a mistake to think that Nigel Kneale only wrote stories involving alien possession and invasion. An excellent example of this is The Abominable Snowman, a 1957 Hammer horror film based on Kneale's own BBC television play The Creature. Again tapping into popular interest at the time, the film follows the exploits of an English anthropologist with an American expedition as they search the Himalayas for the legendary Yeti, the ape-man of Tibet. In the real world, speculation about the existence of an unidentified creature living in the Himalayas had been sparked off in November 1951, when Eric Shipton and Michael Ward of the Everest Reconnaissance Expedition found several large footprints as they traversed the Menlung Glacier, and, two years later, Edmund Hillary made a similar discovery during his historic conquest of Mount Everest.

  

In the film, Kneale turns perceptions on their head by suggesting that the so-called Abominable Snowman is not so abominable at all and, perhaps, even a great deal better than mankind who turn out to be the real monsters. The central idea is that the Yeti are our collateral descendants from the apes and are patiently and peacefully waiting for mankind to destroy himself, either quickly through war or slowly through pollution, before descending from the mountains to inherit the Earth. 

  

Another excellent example is The Stone Tape, a Christmas ghost story from 1972 and Kneale's last major original work for the BBC. Like Quatermass and the Pit before it (which suggested that poltergeist activity could be explained by the psychic abilities left to us by the Martians), The Stone Tape combined science fiction with the supernatural. The television play revolves around a group of scientists who move into a new research facility: an allegedly haunted Victorian mansion. Curious, they investigate the alleged ghost but soon determine that it is really just some kind of recording of a past event somehow stored by stone in one of the rooms (the stone tape of the title). Believing that this discovery may lead to the development of a whole new recording medium, which they were originally brought together to find in the first place, they throw all their knowledge and high-tech equipment into trying to find a means of playing back the stone tape recording at will. However, their investigations only serve to unleash a far older and more malevolent force, with tragic consequences. Of course, The Stone Tape is where "the stone tape theory" familiar to many paranormal researchers today finds its origins.

  

Kneale also wrote three excellent dystopian texts, a fourth Quatermass story The Quatermass Conclusion, a 1954 television adaptation of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four for the BBC, and The Year of the Sex Olympics. However, we will have to discuss these in a future edition of Room 101. 

   

Hopefully, this goes some way to answering the question of who Nigel Kneale was. Of all the great science fiction writers to emerge from these islands since World War II, including the likes of Arthur C. Clarke, perhaps only Nigel Kneale comes anywhere close to matching H G. Wells in terms of lasting public impact and sheer brilliance. Both successfully tapped into the mass anxieties of their time and placed them at the centre of their stories, making science fiction accessible to the general public. In short, what Wells did for science fiction in print, Kneale did on television, clearing the way for intelligent science fiction drama on the small screen.

READ RICHARD'S ROOM 101 COLUMN FOR BINNALL OF AMERICA

The Esoteric Worlds of Doctor Who - Richard's Room 101

And now for something completely different. In the first two editions of this new column, we delved into the black world of conspiracy theories. In this edition, we are going to lighten things up a bit and migrate to what will be another major topic in Room 101: cult television shows and how they relate to the esoteric.

We start with what is the longest-running science fiction television series in the world and, in my opinion, also the best ... Doctor Who. For those people that do not own a television set and haven't had the time to read the novelisations, Doctor Who is about the adventures of a mysterious alien known simply as "the Doctor." With his companions, the Doctor explores time and space in his travel machine the TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension In Space), encountering danger, solving problems and righting wrongs wherever he goes.

I first became a fan of Doctor Who when my father bought me a video of Genesis of the Daleks, written by Terry Nation. It tells the story of how the Doctor's greatest enemies, the Daleks, were created millennia ago on the war-devastated planet Skaro by the evil genius Davros. To this day, it is my favourite Doctor Who story and, as a child, it triggered my first major interest in science fiction and the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the Cosmos.

If I had to narrow it down to one single thing that got me interested in esoteric subjects in the first place, it would have to be watching repeats of Doctor Who while I was growing up. The writers of the series would often take inspiration from the realms of the esoteric and, in its original 26-season run, everything from bug-eyed aliens to the lost city of Atlantis and the Loch Ness Monster would make an appearance. There are far too many examples of how esoteric subjects were tied into Doctor Who to write about them all, so here are just some of my favourites ... 

   

Death to the Daleks, again by Terry Nation, is an excellent example of how the esoteric was tied into Doctor Who. In this story, the Doctor is drawn to the planet Exxilon, where he must outwit the native savage Exxilons and a crew of stranded Daleks in order to survive. 

  

It looks like the description of the Greys, short with grey skin and big black eyes, might have played a big part in the design of the Exxilons costumes. This is interesting because the story was first broadcast back in 1974, three years before that image of what an alien should look like was made so popular by the release of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977. 

   

Also the writers seem to have taken a lot of inspiration from Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods and the ancient astronaut theory. At one point in Death to the Daleks, the Doctor goes as far as stating that he believes that the ancient Exxilons, who we learn were far more advanced, travelled to Earth and taught the Peruvian Incas how to build their great temples. In an earlier story, The Dæmons, the Doctor tells us that another advanced race of aliens, the Dæmons from the planet Dæmos, came to Earth 100,000 years ago in order to help mankind's development as part of some scientific experiment. 

   

As well as the ancient astronaut theory, Mars anomalies also seem to have inspired the writers of Doctor Who. One story, written by Robert Holmes, is even called Pyramids of Mars. In this story, it is revealed that the ancient Egyptian Gods were inspired by a race of powerful aliens called the Osirans, the last of whom, Sutekh the Destroyer, is imprisoned in the Great Pyramid of Mars. 

   

The lost city of Atlantis is another major esoteric subject that is tied into a number of Doctor Who stories. In The Dæmons, after learning about the many wars and atrocities mankind has committed against their own people, Azal, the last of the Dæmons, warns the Doctor that: "My race destroys its failures. Remember Atlantis."

    

In two other stories, the Doctor even visits the lost city itself. In The Time Monster, the Doctor travels back in time before Atlantis was struck by disaster and we learn that Atlantis was part of the Minoan civilisation (which is a real-life theory still advocated by some today). This is another sign that the writers were very much inspired by the esoteric and the ideas circling it. In an earlier story, The Underwater Menace, the Doctor discovered that some Atlanteans had survived the sinking of Atlantis and had continued to live beneath the waves in isolation from the rest of humanity into modern times (perhaps, in a small way, echoing some of the ideas that would evolve into Mac Tonnies' cryptoterrestrial hypothesis). 

   

However, by far the best two examples of Doctor Who stories that incorporate elements of what would become the cryptoterrestrial hypothesis are Doctor Who and the Silurians and its sequel The Sea Devils, both by Malcolm Hulke. Both stories centre on an ancient super-intelligent race of reptiles that evolved on and dominated the Earth when man was nothing more than a primitive ape. After resting in hibernation deep underground and beneath the sea for millions of years, they awake only to discover that the apes have evolved into man and now rule their world. Very interestingly, Doctor Who and the Silurians was the first broadcast in 1970 the same year Ivan T. Sanderson's Invisible Residents: The Reality of Underwater UFOs was first published. This book hypothesised that perhaps an advanced aquatic non-human civilisation may have evolved right here on the Earth, much in the same way as the Silurians and Sea Devils of Doctor Who did.

   

Ivan T. Sanderson was also well known for his books on cryptozoology (a word Sanderson himself coined in the early 1940s), in particular, books on Lake Monsters, Sea Serpents, Mokèlé-mbèmbé, Yeti, and Sasquatch. All of these creatures, in some form or other, would make an appearance in Doctor Who. For instance, in Terror of the Zygons, the Doctor encountered the Zygon Skarasen at Loch Ness, Scotland, the creature was clearly the Loch Ness Monster. In Invasion of the Dinosaurs, we saw a number of prehistoric beasts in modern London, among them a Brontosaurus, perhaps an ancestor of Mokèlé-mbèmbé. Finally, in The Abominable Snowmen and its sequel The Web of Fear, both written by the team of Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln (one of the co-authors of the controversial 1982 bestseller The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail), the Doctor is threatened by a small army of alien robots disguised as Yeti.

   

So clearly the writers of Doctor Who were inspired by and tied a lot of esoteric-type subjects into the stories. So what?

   

Well, one of the big question issues Tim Binnall keeps raising in BoA: Audio is the lack of young people in Ufology and some other esoteric subjects. Perhaps the best way to solve this problem is to get children interested in science fiction first. Let them learn about these esoteric mysteries through fiction, and then, as they grow up, they will come looking for the truth behind the fiction. The first documentaries about UFOs and the Yeti that I probably watched were episodes of Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World and the reason I watched them was that I had heard about UFOs and the Yeti on Doctor Who!

   

If this theory is correct then Ufology and other esoteric subjects have nothing to fear, the new series of Doctor Who is going strong with millions of very young fans. With that growing fanbase, we can be hopeful that in a few years they, too, will discover our esoteric world.

  

READ RICHARD'S ROOM 101 COLUMN FOR BINNALL OF AMERICA