Archer's Goon

 

I'm not sure what kind of browsing hole I was going down the other day to end up with me watching Archer's Goon. This is a Children's BBC serial from the early '90's. I remember watching the first episode or two on TV at the time. It is based on a 1984 children and young adult's novel by Diana Wynne Jones. It centres on an average middle class family from a suburban town who come home one day to find a dishevelled and aggressive young man sitting in their kitchen. He identifies himself only as "Goon" and says he has come at the bidding of somebody called "Archer", hence the title. It turns out that Quentin, the family's father played by Roger Lloyd-Pack of Only Fools and Horses fame, is involved in some underhand tax evasion scam. He has to produce short passages of words for the local mayor and he is rewarded with full council tax relief. The reason for them wanting these words is not fully explained in the TV series; it might be in the book which I have never read. Quentin's son Howard tries to get to the bottom of the mystery and discovers that the town is ruled by some kind of secret organization run by a group of siblings who control every aspect of the town's government and civil works. They are known only by single names, mostly surnames. They have underground facilities beneath the town's banks, libraries and garages. They travel through sewers or openly on motorbikes. They can control people's electrical appliances in their own homes and use light fittings as hidden microphones to eavesdrop. Amazingly their power extends to the supernatural, the ability to control time and space itself. It's a remarkable story. Of course there are plenty of stories about conspiracies involving secret societies controlling institutions behind the scenes, but this is the first one I've ever heard of that is produced for younger viewers. Unfortunately the author died in 2011, but she has been compared to JK Rowling. There is an Illuminati-type plot in some of the Harry Potter books. These days, in this age of censorship and paranoia, you probably would not find mainstream media making a TV programme like this for kids. The book is still available though, see: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/47521.Archer_s_Goon. See here for all six episodes on a playlist. The quality is not the best; it's an old home VHS recording, but it is watchable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKlXKjosfFg&list=PLmAyiwH3LpisjfEMJvsykKmcXDtVcLImQ.

Planet X Archives

 

I have created a page on Archive.org of all the shows I did on Planet X Radio, see: https://archive.org/details/planetxarchives.
This was a joint online and on air radio station based in Liverpool that I was a part of from 2013 to 2014. I did thirty-two programmes in all; the twenty-three of my own programme on Planet Xtra, The Ben Emlyn-Jones Show, and also the times I was featured on the main Planet X programme. Those were very happy days. Dedicated to the loving memory of Ayem, see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2019/12/ayem-dies.html.

Orwell on Lewis

 

See here for essential background: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2024/07/that-hideous-strength.html.
As soon as I heard that George Orwell had written a review of That Hideous Strength by CS Lewis I braced myself. This would probably be both enthralling and dismaying. It represents the meeting of minds between two of the greatest authors and educators in the country at that time, but they had very different worldviews. I assumed there would be little common ground between them. In fact Orwell begins his appraisal with the words: "On the whole, novels are better when there are no miracles in them." This sentence was exactly what I expected, but then he immediately proceeds to add that some books are worthwhile wherein the supernatural does "play a part." He then comes full circle and says he still wishes that the "magical" element had been left out, but I don't think you can really do that. The whole point of the story is that good and evil have a spiritual source. Orwell however seems to be separating the story in his mind between the elements he likes and the elements he objects to and fails to understand that both are connected. He does accept the technocratic portent of doom quite perceptively though, probably because the review was published in the Manchester Evening News just a week after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. He ends the review with kind words though. Source: https://www.lewisiana.nl/orwell/. Orwell's own classic satire Animal Farm had also just hit the shelves which would certainly have put him in a good mood; otherwise might he'd have been more critical? I still do wonder if Lewis influenced Orwell in some way. I've come across an article by somebody who also asks that, see: https://apilgriminnarnia.com/2015/08/19/1984ths/. I am pleased to say though that generally Orwell is better disposed towards CS Lewis than I expected. Maybe this is because of the times I live in. Orwell was an atheo-materialist and I am of a more recent generation that knows such concepts primarily through the "New Atheists" and the skeptic movement, see: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2021/08/skeptics-portal.html. However, such things did not really exist in the early 20th century when the two men wrote. One can imagine what Richard Dawkins makes of That Hideous Strength; although I doubt he has read it. There were atheists back then, of course, there always has been, but they were mostly of a different kind; gentler, more open-minded and with a sense of patriotism. In Down and Out in Paris and London Orwell writes very fondly of a church adjoining a homeless shelter that provides meals and cups of tea for him and his fellow residents, and encourages them to sing hymns. I think he was something of a cultural Christian, although nobody used that term in those days. I don't know specifically if George Orwell and CS Lewis ever met, but if they did, imagine the conversation they would have had.
See here for more background: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2014/09/was-orwell-mediocre.html.
And: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2008/07/everyone-knows-what-happened-on.html.

Ben Emlyn-Jones on EA Audits

 

I have been featured on the EA Audits YouTube channel, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjSu3QPRhH4.

And: https://www.facebook.com/ben.emlynjones/videos/434641312269186.
We discuss the Pentyrch UFO case. The two principle figures in the case, Caz Clarke and Gari Jones, have left social media and we are concerned for their welfare.
See here for background: https://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.com/2022/03/programme-458-podcast-pentyrch-update.html.
And: https://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2021/06/pentyrch-skywatch.html.

Imminent by Luis Elizondo

 

The book everybody is talking about has finally been launched. Imminent- Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for UFO's by Luis Elizondo is unfortunately only available in three formats: hardback, ebook and audio. My preferred format, paperback, is not yet available; so I settled for Amazon Kindle (something I did in protest, see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2023/03/roald-dahl-memory-holed.html). I was determined not to read any reviews or watch any commentary about the book until I'd read it all myself. All of us have biases, especially those who claim to be free of bias, but I like to control my own as much as possible. Now I have finished the book I am free to look at others' feedback. I will provide my own detailed commentary at a later date, see below. I can say for now that it was extraordinarily interesting to see the process I have been following from the perspective of one of the leading figures on the inside. The reaction from the rest of the UFO community is interesting, yet predictable. The positive figures are as positive as I expected them to be while the skeptics are busily unpicking it. The backslappers have descended into the most copious group masturbation session over it, as I knew they would; gloating about how they and they alone are superior enough to uncover "psyops!" and that "Elizondo is a shill!" and how everybody except them is "naive!" I can't really say anything about that that Cristina Gomez has not already put a lot better, see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2022/07/this-is-lue.html. In due course I will go into more details about my own assessment of this book and that of other critics on a HPANWO TV livestream, see: https://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2024/08/lue-elizondos-book-livestream.html. Suffice to say Elizondo's book is definitely worth getting. Even if you don't believe everything in it, if you are interested in UFO's you should still find it interesting. Source: https://luiselizondo-official.com.
See here for background: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2020/02/ufo-disclosure-portal.html.

Shroud of Turin Proved Real?

 

The Shroud of Turin is one of the most remarkable objects in the world. It is a piece of flax linen fourteen feet long and three and a half feet wide. It was originally carbon dated to the 13th to 14th century. Fragments of pollen trapped in the fabric match species native to the Holy Land indicating it comes from there. It was owned by a number of French aristocrats and kept in a series of churches until it was badly burned by fire. Soon after that, in 1578, it was moved to the royal chapel of the cathedral of San Giovanni Battista in Turin, Italy, hence its name; where it has been kept ever since. What makes the Shroud amazing it that it has on it an image of a tall man with a beard and long hair. The man has wounds on his wrists and forehead and these correspond with what looks like bloodstains on the cloth. The front and back on the man are visible vertically on the cloth indicating that it was wrapped around him from head to toe; this is the traditional way to shroud a corpse in Jewish funeral rites. Obviously this man matches the biblical description of Jesus Christ and in fact the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke describe how, after his crucifixion, Joseph of Aramathea officiated the burial of Jesus and wrapped his body in a shroud. The Shroud's fame only really took off in 1898 when it was photographed and the negative revealed a positive image of the man, meaning that the image itself was a photographic negative. Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, of Rennes le Chateau fame, claim that it is an unrecorded experiment in early photography by Leonardo da Vinci. They say that the face of the man resembles portraits of Leo indicating that he modelled himself. Although Leonardo was undoubtedly a very clever man who was interested in optics, there is no trace of conventional photographic chemicals on the shroud. The oldest known permanent photograph was taken over three hundred years later in 1826. The original carbon dating done in 1988 has always been called into question and now a new test has been done using "WAXS", wide-angle X-ray scattering. This reveals the age of the cellulose in the linen. The cloth is actually much older than was previously thought, about two thousand years old; so it was made at the time of Christ. Of course just because the cloth is old enough to be Jesus' shroud doesn't mean necessarily that it is. Source: https://metro.co.uk/2024/08/20/scientists-analysing-cloth-jesus-buried-in-make-huge-breakthrough-21454792/. New analysis on the marks thought to be bloodstains also supports the authenticity of the Shroud. They have chemicals in them matching those of blood from somebody who died of shock and trauma, which was the cause of death from crucifixion. According to the Gospels Jesus' received wounds where the man in the image has them. The forehead ones were caused by the crown of thorns put on his head as mockery for him being declared "King of Jews". Source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-13765919/shroud-turin-jesus-cloth-confirms-biblical-story.html.
 
When I brought this up on Facebook somebody replied that it had to be fake because the image was that of a white man. This is despite the fact it shows no skin colour; the long hair and beard match the traditional form of Jesus in the ecclesiastical art of Europe. These pictures also often show Jesus with pale skin. Of course Jesus would not have looked like that. Racially he was the same as the indigenous population of the region today, the Palestinians and the Sephardic Jews. In other words he would have been brown with shorter black hair. My correspondent showed me some old Egyptian Coptic pictures of Jesus and they show him this way. However it could be that Jesus styled his hair and beard to make himself look more Greek or Roman. That might have given him some status the same way that modern British men drive a particular car. I'm not sure about the Shroud of Turin. It remains enigmatic and fascinating. One thing's for sure, there are only two possibilities. Either it is one of the most extraordinary and unusual works of art and/or technology every devised; or it is the most incredible holy relic the world has ever seen. Both possibilities are exhilarating.
See here for more information: https://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.com/2020/04/third-rail-radio-programme-83.html.
And: https://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.com/2014/03/ben-emlyn-jones-on-mind-set-podcast-45.html.

Ben Emlyn-Jones on Fockham Hall Radio 13

 

See here for the programme: https://www.youtube.com/live/fcP9jbTLZKA.
I have been featured again on Fockham Hall Radio. Subjects discussed include: haunted houses, what do aliens want with us? timeslips and much much more. I was joined on the show by Nathan Lucius.
See here for my previous interview on FHR: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2024/08/ben-emlyn-jones-on-fockham-hall-radio-12.html.