Nick Redfern

A good collection of information in encyclopedic form about Bigfoot and his relatives, certain to be informative to all but the most knowledgeable. There is, of course, the expected accounts about Jacko, the yeti, the links to proto-humans, UFOs and Bigfoot, and the Russian almasty captured in WWII. However, there are also aspects I was not as familiar with including numerous reports of Bigfoot shot at but showing no signs of being hit, reports linking Bigfoot with maintaining shelter in show more cave systems, and apparent Bigfoot shelters found in the woods (something Les Stroud, Survivorman, discussed in his Bigfoot-hunting TV special). The encyclopedic format and liberal use of photos aids readability, and provides a broad overview of the topic. Makes me want to go hunting for Bigfoot in the nearby Shawnee National Forest of Southern Illinois, a Bigfoot hangout I've been told (farmers frequently report seeing them walking across their fields near the distant treeline frequently). Highly recommended. show less

UFOs are weird. Folklore and UFO lore cross over in ways that can't simply be handwaved away as 'people in the past misinterpreted aliens as fairies/gods'. Moving stars, glowing wisps, and lights in the sky have been an element of the occult, from ancient mystery cults, to tribal shamanic initiations and 20th century Western ritual magick. In 1917 Aleister Crowley's made contact with a daemonic entity which bore a striking resemblance to the alien archetype later known as the 'grey'. show more Three-hundred years earlier, John Dee's conversations with angels bore striking resemblences to modern cases of extraterrestrial 'channeling'. Even in the mid-20th century, B-movie style American alien abductions inexplicably contained strange references to celtic fairy myths that pricked up the ears of European folklorists halfway around the world.
While the pop-culture idea of UFOs—as told in movies, popular books, and newspaper articles—would have you believe that extraterrestrial visitation is the most reasonable hypothesis, and the most and widely accepted amongst researchers, even the most hardline 'nuts-and-bolts' extraterrestrialists begrudgingly accept some level of the paranormal—almost all 'traditional' UFO stories at least contain elements of psi phenomena and telepathy.

With all this in mind, it's not so far-fetched that—after being called to the Pentagon and handed an ultra-top-secret dossier on the entire history of UFOs—a gang of good-old-boy cold warriors would conclude that there was something demonic about the whole thing. The UFO's position as a modern incarnation of the trickster archetype, and its associations with death, would makes it difficult for most Christians to conclude anything else.

Constructed from a series of interviews with members of the 'Collins Elite'—a loosely organised Pentagon research team that investigated the links between UFOs and Biblical demons—Nick Redfern's Final Events explores everything from Jack Parsons opening a portal to Hell in 1946, to the idea that a fake alien invasion might someday be staged by the world's governments to justify totalitarian control over their populations. In one chapter we learn that the extraterrestrial hypothesis itself was seeded in the mainstream by factions within the US state apparatus—either because they considered non-extraterrestrial hypotheses to be 'unscientific' (read: didn't have the steel-and-glass space-age aesthetic of Science), or because they considered the public consideration of non-physicalism to be, in and of itself, dangerous.
With this in mind—and with what we now know about the CIA's historic (and ongoing) influence on Hollywood and major broadcasting companies—it may now strike the reader as strange that there hasn't ever been a big budget story of demons, interdimensional entities, or members even a breakaway civilisation posing as aliens to take over the world.
Signs and Colony may be the exceptions here, but they had to bury their ledes so deeply that virtually everyone missed the point—and Colony was suddenly and unceremoniously cancelled, despite positive reviews and above strong viewership, when it became clear where the story was going.

Unfortunately, while this all sounds very interesting, Final Events does llittle to stand out as more than a relatively rudimentary work of long-form magazine journalism.
Sure, Redfern adequately contextualises the claims being made by his interviewees, and he does sometimes suggest all of this might be disinformation or the ravings of madmen, but the book feels like it needs something a bit more—it needed to be more than some summarised wikipedia pages and (very) loosely transcribed interviews. There's very little sense that dots are being connected and all potential leads are being followed up—it's a strangely passive affair; Nick reports the story, but never really tries to dig into it. But, maybe this is for the best, the few times Nick's own opinions do make their way into the book they are kind of bizarre.

At one point, Nick is told by an original member of the Collins Elite that the goal of the UFO-demons is to turn people away from organised Christianity and toward scientific atheism so that the demons can get at our unprotected souls. Nick is then told by a more recent member that, while the previous statement is true, the biggest danger to America is not the demons themselves but the theocratic Christian political regime that will emerge as a backlash to the demons of any of this ever became common knowledge. Nick, for some reason, agrees with this second statement, and I have no idea why—if we were to somehow prove demons were real and Christianity is the one true faith, why wouldn't we want a theocratic dictatorship to help save our immortal souls? Would a hundred mortal years of (in this scenario, objectively wrong) idealistic atheist liberalism really be worth it for an eternity of (in this scenario, real and easily avoidable) damnation?

The ready acceptance of this idea that demons are less dangerous than the government is also particularly bizarre as Nick repeatedly refers to the character who says this as 'without doubt the creepiest individual I have ever personally encountered ... wizened, sickly, and oily'—then goes on to describe his unsettling, and very hands-on relationship with a much younger blonde girlfriend. In a book light on adjectives and personal opinion, when it comes to this one character Nick's revulsion is palpable. And yet, after spending months immersed in demonic infiltration rhetoric—being told that the demons will use the UFO narrative to make people afraid of organised expressions of faith—Nick doesn't even seem to notice the strangeness of this slimy creature, a guy who took over and subverted the Pentagon's Christian UFO research group, suddenly telling him that, despite everything previously discussed, the biggest threat faced by humanity is not the demons (even though they do exist) but actually a looming American Christian theocracy. I thought Nick might question this, push back against it, or at least joke that this character was looking more and more like the demon-worshipping infiltrators the original Collins Elite were afraid of—complete with his own Scarlet Woman—but instead he just flatly agrees with him that, yes, American theocracy sure is a scary thought.

I am no friend to Christianity, but it's bizarre that a book which engages so fairly and cautiously with the idea of biblical demons being investigated by the Pentagon suddenly flips 180 degrees into an obviously silly narrative about republicans planning a Christian BlueBeam where holographic angels coming down from the sky are used as a pretence to ban atheism and turn America into a Christian police state. Any comparisons made between this idea and current political trends would be trite—the Tech Elite/Christian Nationalist alliance currently in ascension seems to want to create and then enter into a faustian pact with their own artificial demon to bring about the Apocalypse; the Christian theocracy proposed in this book would instead be acting as holy swords to vanquish demons and stave off the apocalypse.

Another major issue with Redfern's passive jouornalism is that it means a number of potentially interesting tangents are mentioned then never followed up on. What if the One World Government is actually about trying to stave off the apocalypse? What are the implications of psi-studies being affected by ambient electricity and radio waves, and subjects in Faraday Cages having higher rates of statistically anomalous results? What about the offhand mention of states and insitutions enforcing materialist worldviews on the public to stop them believing in (and therefore attempting to cultivate) psionic abilities? What does it mean that 'abductions' may be entirely non-physical and acually only occuring in the subjects' minds? These might seem like asides unconnected to the general hypothesis, but they were all important enough for the interviewees to mention them. Left unexplored, they feel like missing puzzle pieces hinting at a broader, far more interesting picture.

Final Events certainly isn't a bad book. It's a solid enough piece of journalism with some interesting characters and some revelations which have only become more interesting in the years since its publication. Some of the discussions preconfigure the shadier elements of the recent 'disclosure movement', and the simple report-the-facts-and-nothing-else approach does add an element of trustworthyness; whether the subjects are lying or not is up to the reader, but Redfern is certainly not dishonest in his reporting. The problem is the Collins Elite deserved more than a blunt, cursory set of interviews—they deserved intense, almost obsessive investigation.

There's masterpiece in here, but it's trapped inside a book that's both far too short and far too shallow. Rather than standing shoulder to shoulder with Annie Jacobsen's Phenomena and Tom O'Neill's Chaos, Final Events ended up being little more than a fun bit of UFO popcorn—The Men Who Stare at Goats ft. Demons. show less

I was looking forward to reading this. Unfortunately it felt flat and was easy to dismiss. The best things about the book are the further reading section, the index, and the pictures. It seems to want to cover conspiracy theories but actually focuses on modes of death. Then it muddles the causes of death to unknown actors, aliens, or supernatural beings. The methodology is bizarre as Redfern starts with a normal journalist's posting of bizarre news stories. Redfern then goes on to posit show more non-sequitur after non-sequitur as his conclusion. The methodology he utilizes is meant to further him having more books to assemble. This is not one to add to your library but one you might look at to see how aliens are linked with every suspicious death. I actually dislike writing critical reviews because I love reading so much, but this was not a real historical account of past events around the world. show less

3.5 stars for purely entertainment reasons.

The thing about conspiracies is that they're often a string of coincidences, conjectures, and incidences which may or may not be connected at all - and there's a lot of that going on here. Though I tried to keep an open mind and I really do enjoy a good Urban Legend, I found some of the author's conclusions just a tad out there. One thing the author is clear on and I agree, Slenderman is a product of the internet, a critter created on and spread by show more electronic means. How very modern.

On the other hand, when the UL in question went from a fairly innocent bit of scary fun to at least one attempted murder of one 12 year old by two other 12 year olds who took Slenderman way more seriously than I suspect Mr. Knudson, the originator, ever intended, you gotta wonder. (One of the girls got sentenced to 40 years in a psychiatric institution - so there was some real world nastiness going on here. The youngster who was attacked survived, thankfully.)

The first time anyone heard of this creature was on a website Something Awful dedicated to photo manipulation and alternative type stories back in 2009. However, Mr. Redfern brings up some interesting ideas and possible antecedents for Slenderman from German and First American folklore to popular culture and straight up imagination. The originator, Michael Knudson, admits to being influenced by writers like Steven King* and H.P. Lovecraft.

*Though it's never brought up in the book, my brain kept throwing up Pennywise in his true form from [b:It|644173|It|Stephen King|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1355696147l/644173._SX50_.jpg|150259] - which predates Slenderman by nearly 25 years but the inspiration is pretty obvious. show less