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bigphoot1 Great Old One Joined: 30 Jul 2005 Total posts: 880 Gender: Unknown |
 Posted: 05-07-2008 20:09 Post subject: |
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| Timble2 Imaginary person Joined: 09 Feb 2003 Total posts: 7114 Location: Practically in Narnia Age: 58 Gender: Female |
| Posted: 05-07-2008 20:55 Post subject: |
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| I read all of Lyall Watson's stuff, one of authors who kept me interested in Forteana. Seems like a really interesting chap. |
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| Pietro_Mercurios Heuristically Challenged
Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 05-07-2008 23:21 Post subject: |
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I'm also going to miss Charles Wheeler, one of the really authoritative (BBC) journalistic voices of my life.
But, goodbye Lyall Watson, who helped popularise the the idea that the whole of Nature might just be sentient, in ways that we humans can barely imagine. |
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| stuneville Administrator
Joined: 09 Mar 2002 Total posts: 10230 Location: FTMB HQ Age: 46 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 06-07-2008 07:49 Post subject: |
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I was told years ago, that Watson and Ion Alexis Will, of the original Gang of Fort, were the same person. Don't know how true that is.
Anyway, RIP Lyall. One of the greats .
Also recently deceased, Don S Davis, Maj-Gen Hammond from Stargate SG-1.
| Quote: | Don S. Davis: 1942-2008
Monday - June 30, 2008 | by Darren Sumner
With great sadness we must report that veteran actor Don S. Davis passed away on June 29, 2008. He was 65 years old.
Don co-starred on Stargate SG-1 for the show's first seven years, helping to launch the enduring science fiction franchise. Davis played Major General George Hammond, base commander and a father figure to many of the show's characters.
He is also well-known for his portrayal of Major Garland Briggs in Twin Peaks. |
http://www.gateworld.net/news/2008/06/don_s._davis_1942-2008.shtml |
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| JamesWhitehead Piffle Prospector Joined: 02 Aug 2001 Total posts: 5779 Location: Manchester, UK Gender: Male |
| Posted: 13-08-2008 17:07 Post subject: |
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I was sorry to see that Jon-Erik Beckjord passed away on 22nd June, 2008.
Obituary in San Francisco Chronicle
Such was his reputation that his announced prostate cancer was believed by many to be a figment of his imagination. Sadly it was not.
The web will a slightly duller place without the doings and bannings of this Mensa member and a one-time fellow-poster on the FT board.
RIP. |
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| sherbetbizarre Great Old One Joined: 04 Sep 2004 Total posts: 1418 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 07-05-2009 01:53 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | Hans Holzer, Ghost Hunter, Dies at 89
Published: April 29, 2009
Hans Holzer, whose investigations into the paranormal took him to haunted houses all over the world, most notably the Long Island house that inspired “The Amityville Horror,” died on Sunday at his home in Manhattan. He was 89.
The death was confirmed by his daughter Alexandra Holzer.
Mr. Holzer — who wrote more than 140 books on ghosts, the afterlife, witchcraft, extraterrestrial beings and other phenomena associated with the realm he called “the other side” — carried out his most famous investigation with the medium Ethel Johnson-Meyers in 1977. Together they roamed the house in Amityville, in which a young man, Ronald DeFeo Jr., had murdered his parents and four siblings in 1974.
The house had become notorious after its next owners claimed to have been tormented by a series of spine-chilling noises and eerie visitations, set forth in the best-selling 1977 book “The Amityville Horror: A True Story,” written by Jay Anson.
After Ms. Johnson-Meyers channeled the spirit of a Shinnecock Indian chief, who said that the house stood on an ancient Indian burial ground, Mr. Holzer took photographs of bullet holes from the 1974 murders in which mysterious halos appeared.
Mr. Holzer went on to write a nonfiction book about the house, “Murder in Amityville” (1979), which formed the basis for the 1982 film “Amityville II: The Possession”; he also wrote two novels, “The Amityville Curse” (1981) and “The Secret of Amityville” (1985).
Hans Holzer was born in Vienna and developed an interest in the supernatural when his uncle Henry told him stories about ghosts and fairies. He studied archaeology, ancient history and numismatics at the University of Vienna but left Austria for New York with his family in 1938, just before the Nazi takeover.
After studying Japanese at Columbia University, Mr. Holzer indulged an infatuation with the theater in the 1950s. He wrote sketches for the short-lived revue “Safari!” and the book and music for “Hotel Excelsior,” about a group of young Americans in Paris, which opened in Provincetown, Mass., and proceeded no farther. He also wrote theater reviews for The London Sporting Review.
He earned a master’s degree in comparative religion and a doctorate in parapsychology at the London College of Applied Science. He went on to teach parapsychology at the New York Institute of Technology.
In 1962 he married the Countess Catherine Genevieve Buxhoeveden. The marriage ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter Alexandra, of Chester, N.Y., he is survived by another daughter, Nadine Widener of Manhattan, and five grandchildren.
In pursuit of ghosts, Mr. Holzer began investigating haunted houses and recording the testimony of subjects who believed that they had had paranormal experiences. This field research, usually conducted with a medium and a Polaroid camera, provided the material for dozens of books, beginning with “Ghost Hunter” (1963).
Mr. Holzer called himself “a scientific investigator of the paranormal.” He disliked the word “supernatural,” since it implied phenomena beyond the reach of science, and did not believe in the word “belief,” which suggests an irrational adherence to ideas not supported by fact. Nevertheless, he held in contempt electronic gadgetry for detecting cold spots, magnetic anomalies and the like, preferring direct communication through a medium.
He did believe in reincarnation and past lives (he vividly recalled the Battle of Glencoe in 1692 in one of his Scottish lifetimes) and was a Wiccan high priest, as well as a vegan.
He felt completely at ease with ghosts. “In all my years of ghost hunting I have never been afraid,” he told Leonard Nimoy on the television series “In Search Of” (for which he was a consultant). “After all, a ghost is only a fellow human being in trouble.” Specifically, a human who has died in traumatic circumstances, does not realize he or she is dead and is, as he told the Web site OfSpirit.com in 2003, “confused as to their real status.”
His continuing ghost quest yielded books like “Ghosts I’ve Met” (1965), “Yankee Ghosts” (1966), “The Great British Ghost Hunt” (1975) and “Hans Holzer’s Travel Guide to Haunted Houses “ (1998). But he had a wide-ranging interest in paranormal phenomena and the occult, reflected in books as varied as “Beyond Medicine” (1973), “Inside Witchcraft” (1980) and “Love Beyond the Grave” (1992).
Mr. Holzer saw life on the other side in sharp detail. As he described it to the Web site ghostvillage.com in 2005, it is strangely like this side, and bureaucratic to boot. The dead who become restless and wish to return to Earth for another go-round must fall in line and register with a clerk. |
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/30/books/30holzer.html?_r=3&emc=eta1 |
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| gordonrutter The Indescribable Horror that is a
Great Old One Joined: 03 Aug 2001 Total posts: 872 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 06-07-2009 07:49 Post subject: |
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John Keel has died
John Keel passed on July 03 at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City after a several month stint in a nursing home near his Upper West Side apartment.
Gordon |
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| Mighty_Emperor Divine Wind
Joined: 18 Aug 2002 Total posts: 19943 Location: Mongo Age: 42 Gender: Male |
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| rynner2 What a Cad!
Great Old One Joined: 13 Dec 2008 Total posts: 21362 Location: Under the moon Gender: Male |
| Posted: 29-05-2010 10:47 Post subject: |
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Martin Gardner: Scientific and philosophical writer celebrated for his ingenious mathematical puzzles and games
By Morton Schatzman
Saturday, 29 May 2010
Martin Gardner was of the great intellects of our time, writing engagingly and wittily on a remarkably wide range of subjects.
His main interests were philosophy and religion, and especially the philosophy of science, but his writings went far beyond these areas. Further, he was comfortable with difficult and abstract subjects; he wrote a book explaining relativity, which he updated a few times, and wrote a book, too, about parity in the universe called The Ambidextrous Universe. In a book of essays The Night is Large: collected essays 1938-1995, he organised his lifelong intellectual interests into these categories: physical science, social science, pseudoscience, mathematics, the arts, philosophy, and religion.
In 1956 he began to provide a monthly column for Scientific American called "Mathematical Games"; it offered puzzles, tricks and riddles, and sometimes difficult mathematical problems. "They approach mathematics in a spirit of fun, but combined with the fun there is an earnest effort to lead the reader into areas of mathematics that are far from trivial," he said of it.
He wrote about the "sense of surprise that all great mathematicians feel, and all great teachers of mathematics are able to communicate" and that he knew of no better way to do this than "by way of games, puzzles, paradoxes, magic tricks, and all the other curious paraphernalia of 'recreational mathematics'."
The monthly columns were a regular feature of Scientific American for 25 years, and he continued to provide occasional pieces after that. After retiring he said that a continuing pleasure was receiving letters from mathematicians telling him it was his column that had first aroused their interest in the subject.
Gardner was also a famous debunker of pseudoscientific claims. His first book in that genre, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (1952), had 26 chapters, nearly each of which attacked a different crank theory. Among his targets were flat-earthers, partisans of flying saucers, Lysenkoism, the Forteans, medical cults and quacks, William Horatio Bates's method for Cure of Imperfect Eyesight by Treatment Without Glasses, Wilhelm Reich's orgonomy, and dianetics.
He remarked once: "Thanks to the freedom of our press and the electronic media, the voices of cranks are often louder and clearer than the voices of genuine scientists. Crank books – on how to lose weight without cutting down on calories, on how to talk to plants, on how to cure your ailments by rubbing your feet, on how to apply horoscopes to your pets, on how to use ESP in making business decisions, on how to sharpen razor blades by putting them under little models of the great Pyramid of Egypt – far outsell many books... I reserve the right of moral indignation."
He was a founding Fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims for the Paranormal (CSICOP, pronounced "psycop"). He believed it the "duty of both scientists and science writers to keep exposing errors of bad science, especially in medical fields, in which false beliefs can cause needless suffering and even death". He regularly wrote articles for the publication Skeptical Inquirer, many of which were collected into books. In the March/April 2010 issue he critically analysed Oprah Winfrey, and alleged that among her TV guests were people who preached medically worthless views. The biologist Stephen Jay Gould called Gardner "the single brightest beacon defending rationality and good science against the mysticism and anti-intellectualism that surround us".
He had yet other interests: he published books that he annotated in detail, such as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, & Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark, The Ancient Mariner, the American baseball ballad Casey at the Bat, as well as the ballad The Night Before Christmas. He once said: "I really don't do any work. I just play all the time, and am fortunate enough to get paid for it." 
In Gardner's introduction to the Alice books he wrote: "The last level of metaphor in the Alice books is this: that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician." He also said: "Laughter is a kind of no man's land between faith and despair. We preserve our sanity by laughing at life's surface absurdities, but the laughter turns to bitterness and derision if directed toward the deeper irrationalities of evil and death".
Gardner was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1914. He studied philosophy at the University of Chicago and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from there in 1936. He took no maths courses, and said later that he would have, had he known he would be writing one day a column on the subject. He learnt as he went along: "There is no better way to learn anything than to write about it," he said.
etc...
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/martin-gardner-scientific-and-philosophical-writer-celebrated-for-his-ingenious-mathematical-puzzles-and-games-1986237.html |
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| Spookdaddy Cuckoo Joined: 24 May 2006 Total posts: 3923 Location: Midwich Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 29-05-2010 11:22 Post subject: |
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| rynner2 wrote: | | Martin Gardner: Scientific and philosophical writer celebrated for his ingenious mathematical puzzles and games |
A great and inquisitive mind - a great loss. I've got a few of Gardner's books and I love them all - even if I don't always agree with him. It was Gardner's edition of Kordemsky's The Moscow Puzzles which taught me that my life-long aversion to mathematics was entirely unjustified.
In relationship to his non-mathematical work, I'm amazed that Gardner's name doesn't crop up on this board more often - but then I expect the niche he might have occupied for some participants has been amply filled by Mr Dawkins. |
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| _Lizard23_ In love with the
Great Old One Joined: 23 Aug 2001 Total posts: 1914 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 29-05-2010 13:08 Post subject: |
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This is another slightly puzzling one for me, as, while making one of these around 2000 I somehow got the impression he was already dead.  |
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| Spookdaddy Cuckoo Joined: 24 May 2006 Total posts: 3923 Location: Midwich Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 29-05-2010 14:24 Post subject: |
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| _Lizard23_ wrote: | | This is another slightly puzzling one for me, as, while making one of these around 2000 I somehow got the impression he was already dead. |
Actually, looking at the Gathering for Gardner website you would have been forgiven for thinking so - must be quite disconcerting when something that is done in your honour has such an air of the memorial about it. |
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| rynner2 What a Cad!
Great Old One Joined: 13 Dec 2008 Total posts: 21362 Location: Under the moon Gender: Male |
| Posted: 19-10-2010 09:38 Post subject: |
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And after Tubby we have Tubb...
EC Tubb: Seminal writer who was a mainstay of the British science fiction scene for half a century
By Philip Harbottle
Tuesday, 19 October 2010
With his work translated into more than a dozen languages, EC Tubb was well known to readers of science fiction the world over. He was extraordinarily prolific. Beginning in 1951, he published over 130 novels and more than 230 short stories in such magazines as Astounding/Analog, Authentic, Galaxy, Nebula, New Worlds,Science Fantasy, Vision of Tomorrow, and more recently in Fantasy Adventures. Many of his short stories were reprinted in various "World's Best SF" anthologies, and his story "Lucifer" won the Europa Prize in 1972. Tubb was appointed editor of Authentic Science Fiction in 1956, and edited it with great panache until its unnecessary demise in 1957.
Edwin Charles Tubb was born in London in 1919. His writing ambitions had been born shortly before the Second World War when he became a fan of American science fiction pulp magazines. In his early teens he became an avid collector and began to make contact with fellow enthusiasts, eventually joining the pre-war British Science Fiction Association. The outbreak of the war put paid to his early writing ambitions, but after the war the members of the old BSFA, including Tubb's fellow enthusiasts Arthur C Clarke, John Beynon Harris (John Wyndham), Frank Arnold, Sydney J Bounds, John Carnell, Walter Gillings and William F Temple, began to reform. This group of fans and fledgling professionals eventually launched their own SF magazine, New Worlds, to which Tubb became a regular contributor.
Within a year of his debut as a short story writer, Tubb began producing novels. His early books were exciting adventure stories, written in the prevailing fashion of the early 1950s, which demanded that stories should be fast moving and, above all else, entertaining. Yet from his first novel, Saturn Patrol (1951), Tubb's work was characterised by a sense of plausibility, logic, and human insight.
These qualities were even more evident in his short stories, which tended to a more thoughtful, psychological type of narrative, and by 1956 they had begun to be reprinted in Judith Merril's prestigious "Year's Best Science Fiction" series of anthologies; many of them continued to be reprinted in various later "World's Best SF" anthologies. His haunting story "Little Girl Lost" (1955) was adapted for American television for Rod Serling's Night Gallery series in 1972, while in 1988, his 1955 novelette Kalgan the Golden was adapted as a graphic novel by myself and the artist Ron Turner
Tubb's first major SF novels were Alien Dust (1955) a gritty story of Martian colonisation, and The Space-Born (1956), a highly original take on the "generation starship" theme that anticipated by decades the central theme of Logan's Run – the elimination of those over a certain age in order to conserve resources. In 1962, The Space-Born was adapted as a 90-minute television play by Radio Television Française.
When the British market for SF novels slumped in 1956, Tubb diversified into writing pseudonymous paperback western novels. Many of them were based on historical events during and after the Civil War and were considered notable enough to earn the author an entry in Twentieth Century Western Writers (St James Press, 1991) and to be reprinted 50 years later in both hardcover and paperback. Tubb later became interested in Roman history, and many consider that some of his best work was contained in his "The Gladiators" historical trilogy, Atilus the Slave (1975), Atilus the Gladiator (1975), and Gladiator (1978).
Because many of his SF shortstories of the 1950s and early 1960s were under pseudonyms they tended to be overlooked at the time, so that despite continued commercial success, Tubb never received the critical recognition he deserved. Many of his ideas were seminal, and were later reused by other writers to popular acclaim – most notably his story "Precedent" (1952), which posited the grim and logical solution to the problem of stowaways in spaceships, appearing more than two years before Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations".
...
A dystopian novel, To Dream Again, was accepted on the day Tubbs died, and is to be published by Ulverscroft next year. His final, and possibly his most outstanding novel, Fires of Satan, is under consideration. New collections of short stories include The Best Science Fiction of EC Tubb (2003, US), and Mirror of the Night (2003, UK). A definitive French-language collection, Dimension, edited and translated by Richard F Nolane, is set to be published by Riviere Blanche in 2012.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/ec-tubb-seminal-writer-who-was-a-mainstay-of-the-british-science-fiction-scene-for-half-a-century-2110189.html |
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| ramonmercado Psycho Punk
Joined: 19 Aug 2003 Total posts: 17931 Location: Dublin Gender: Male |
| Posted: 06-11-2010 22:15 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | UFO society president who claimed discovery of spaceship portal
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/obituaries/2010/1106/1224282791604.html
Sat, Nov 06, 2010
BETTY MEYLER: WHEN THEY said at her funeral that the whole world was not enough for Betty Meyler, it wasn't meant as a put-down of the woman who relished her role as president of the UFO Society of Ireland.
A "colourful character", "larger than life" . . . all the usual cliches were applied to describe the 79-year-old expert on flower-arranging and cookery who was also convinced that she had discovered a UFO portal just off Church Island on Lough Key in Co Roscommon.
Her passion for UFOs was sparked by newspaper reports of a mysterious crash in the Curlew mountains outside Boyle in 1996, an event described by many as "Ireland's Roswell" - a reference to Roswell, New Mexico, where, it is claimed but hotly disputed, that extraterrestrial debris, including alien corpses, was found after an alien spaceship allegedly crashed there in 1947.
Amid a flurry of speculation and whispered tales of alien visitors to the Curlew mountains, Meyler decided that a small society was needed where people could meet and swap such stories without fear of being laughed at.
Only one person turned up for the first meeting, however, and so Meyler, sitting in the hired room on her own, solemnly proposed and seconded herself for the jobs of president, secretary and treasurer, and duly announced to the world, although it was absent at the time, that the UFO Society of Ireland was born.
Her passion for the subject was infectious, and by the time she came to organise her first international UFO conference, she had been the subject of several documentaries, had been interviewed by almost every radio station in the country and, much to her pride, had shared the cover of Women's Way magazine with Robbie Williams.
Her origins were as exotic as one might expect from a woman who as a pensioner trekked the Himalayas, explored Machu Picchu and fulfilled a lifelong ambition to visit the Galapagos.
She was born in India to Henry Mountain, editor of a Catholic newspaper in Calcutta, and Ida Martinelli, who was of English and Italian parents. Betty's survival instincts probably came from her father, who told her he had been left "destitute and orphaned" after the family's indigo plantation in India was rendered worthless by the discovery of synthetic dyes.
At the age of 17, Betty Meyler waved goodbye to her parents and took the boat, as they thought to Edinburgh, where she was to study physiotherapy. In fact she eloped to London and from there to Nigeria with her boyfriend Donald Henderson, whom she married in Lagos.
The young couple had three children - Julie, Gail and Donald - but the civil war in Nigeria opened the next chapter in their lives and they ended up in Guernsey, where they successfully ran a small hotel.
In Guernsey, Betty took flying lessons and got her pilot's licence. Her instructor was a former RAF officer called Jack Meyler who, after her marriage ended, moved with her to Co Sligo where they ran a small hotel, Rock House, on the shores of Lough Arrow.
Many locals recall a real-life Fawlty Towers, with Jack frequently regaling German visitors, who dared to complain, with stories of his more successful escapades during the second World War. His wife's diplomatic skills were tested to the limit.
The romance and the business floundered, and Betty moved to nearby Boyle. "Boyle has never been the same since," said her son Donald, and indeed the most famous ufologist in the country immersed herself in the community.
"Everything she did, she did with gusto," recalled close friend Mary Cretaro. Her interests included the local Irish Countrywomen's Association (ICA), the Tourism Society, the Tidy Towns committee, the Chamber of Commerce, the camera club, and after her first brush with cancer, she set up a support group for fellow sufferers called "Go Cancer Go".
She was a practitioner of reiki, the Japanese technique for stress reduction and relaxation that is said also to promote healing through hand contact, which taps into the body's "life force energy".
She was a keen dowsing enthusiast, and locals who were wheedled into bringing foreign film crews out on Lough Key were bemused to see her, in her late 70s, seated in the boat, swinging her pendulum as she scanned the skyline for evidence of the UFO portal.
She took no offence when people laughed, and said in one interview that she was regularly asked whether she was making sandwiches for the little green men.
"I never heard her say a bad word about anyone," said friend Sean O'Dowd, who said that Betty - with her cultured accent and exotic background - was a one-woman publicity machine for Boyle. Her enthusiasm for helping others was her most endearing quality.
An oncologist who commented on her perfect skin was told to let his wife in on the secret - vodka and garlic.
Her sense of fun never deserted her. A friend visiting her in St Luke's Hospital was distressed to see she was in pain. Desperate to help, he urged her to mix some honey with a drop of brandy, add an aloe vera leaf, stir, and take a spoonful each day.
Later when asked whether it helped at all, she confided that she had tried to make up the soothing potion several times, but "I found that I always drank the brandy first".
Elizabeth (Betty) Meyler Henderson: born July 21st, 1931; died October 24th, 2010 |
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| rynner2 What a Cad!
Great Old One Joined: 13 Dec 2008 Total posts: 21362 Location: Under the moon Gender: Male |
| Posted: 06-11-2010 22:30 Post subject: |
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| ramonmercado wrote: | | Quote: | UFO society president who claimed discovery of spaceship portal
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/obituaries/2010/1106/1224282791604.html
Sat, Nov 06, 2010
BETTY MEYLER: WHEN THEY said at her funeral that the whole world was not enough for Betty Meyler, it wasn't meant as a put-down of the woman who relished her role as president of the UFO Society of Ireland.
....
Her sense of fun never deserted her. A friend visiting her in St Luke's Hospital was distressed to see she was in pain. Desperate to help, he urged her to mix some honey with a drop of brandy, add an aloe vera leaf, stir, and take a spoonful each day.
Later when asked whether it helped at all, she confided that she had tried to make up the soothing potion several times, but "I found that I always drank the brandy first".
Elizabeth (Betty) Meyler Henderson: born July 21st, 1931; died October 24th, 2010 |
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What a wonderful person! A sad loss to the world.
(I have a fondness for UFO portals, having lived near one (allegedly) in West Wales for a couple of years. I'd gaze at that place, and wonder "What if..?") |
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