This wonderful photo from the mid-1970s depicts a young man named John Shepherd who "established this UFO-detecting station in his grandparent's home… His equipment includes radar, sonar, scanners, and homing devices which attempt to track the 'Aliens' he believes are studying the earth." The photo appears in a new, lightly-revised edition of my friend Jacques Vallée's classic 1979 book Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts and Cults. The rare book has just been republished by Daily Grail Publishing. From Fortean researcher Mark Pilkington's post on the Further blog about the book:
MOD is a fascinating examination of the UFO subculture's sinister underbelly. Vallee considers the ways that the UFO mystery can be manipulated by those seeking to exert psychological and psychosocial control over marginal elements of society, and falls prey himself to the kind of controlled paranoia experienced by Robert Anton Wilson in his own Cosmic Trigger. Thirty years down the line we can see that Vallee was absolutely spot on with some of the concerns he expressed in MOD: amongst the groups he investigated were Bo and Peep, the 'Mysterious Two' who went on to lead the Heaven's Gate suicides two decades later.
Jacques Vallée's Messengers of Deception on Amazon, Messengers of Deception at Further
