This picture pops up on a lot of websites run by people worried and/or wondering about space aliens abducting Earthlings. I came across it while researching Harry Houdini, a sidebar story that led me to Christian Chelman, the Belgian purveyor of “bizarre magic”. I was surfing UFO sites at the same time for a book review and did not come across this photo among the usual stargazer feeding grounds. It’s for Master Race from Space festishists only, you see.

The website that Chelman runs with a bunch of his friends — based around an online “museum” called the Museum of Supernatural History (the Surnateum) — seemed quite fetching at first because it’s packed with creepy old antiquities of the sort that have always fascinating me. He calls them “hauntiques” because he wraps spooky stories around them in his stage show, and storytelling is what bizarre magic (which tellingly started in the late 1960s) is all about.

It’s often also about arcane lore, so you get a lot of shamans’ spells and glib patter about necromancy, magi and grimoires. I read and read and read and then I flipped the cyberpage because it’s all so much hogwash. I started out with Houdini and ended up knee-deep in Dungeons & Dragons crap.

Chelman is possessed by “a formidable voodoo entity” and now has a split personality, the museum “closely guards the secret formula for a long-life elixir in its secret vaults, as well as a time machine [developed in 1910 by Nikola Tesla]”, numerous occultists’ names are dropped, lost civilisations raked over, and ancient curses are suggested as the reason why “mysterious killers terrorised London, Paris, Düsseldorf and Brussels [and] inexplicable shipwrecks swallowed up the titans of the sea and skies”.

These resulted from the loot stolen from ravaged temples and tombs, and the frightened owners offloaded it all on the Surnateum. They were terrified by what they’d uncovered. “Just look at what happened,” the website says, “when the Taliban, installed in power by the Americans, destroyed two giant statues of the Buddha. Before long, the Taliban disappeared. Was that just a coincidence?”

Chelman has in his collection a “bottle imp”, a “bowl of dreams” filled with coins (one from the Boxer Rebellion, pieces of eight, also casino tokens), a vampire hunter’s kit he dates to 1899, “a haunted Russian doll”, a Magic Mirror, the “cursed tobacco pouch” once owned by the skipper of the Flying Dutchman and “the Fifth Seal of the Apocalypse”.

He’s got a ghost hunter’s toolbox that contains a rare vintage camera, boxes of talcum powder, 19th-century skeleton keys, a combination hammer-cutter-screwdriver-crowbar-pliers, several tape measures for locating false walls, rope, string and copper wire, wax to seal off rooms, thermometers, a portable battery, a 1914 Corona typewriter, whistles, tongs, a stethoscope, a sundial, a prayerbook and photos of dead children.

And let’s not forget his hand of a yeti from Tibet!

“Where possible, these objects are returned to where they came from; otherwise they are kept in the sanctuary.”

Hard to say to whom Chelman can return his “horned human skull”. It is, he says, “probably a relic of a satanic cult or a cult devoted to the Great God Pan”. Museum staff reckoned it was a fake, but had it analysed and found that “the horns are genuinely part of the skull”.

“Giant skeletons of horned men were also exhumed in Pennsylvania in the 1880s,” the site says, so off I went to virtual Pennsylvania, and that’s how I ended up among the ufologists, who all refer back to the Surnateum!

Displaying the same photo that Chelman has on his site, ThothWeb.com offers this: “The skull is said to have been discovered in France between 1920 and 1940, but its current whereabouts are unknown. Surnateum, however, claims to have analysed the skull …

“Giant skeletons of horned men over seven feet tall are reported to have been exhumed from an ancient burial mound in the USA in the 1880s. It was estimated that the bodies were buried around 1200 AD. The find was made by a reputable group of antiquarians … [and] the remains were sent to the American Investigating Museum in Philadelphia. The museum later claimed that the remains had been stolen, and they were never recovered.”

ThothWeb then not quite helpfully explains that “horned creatures” have long been held in lofty regard, such as Baphomet, worshipped by the Knights Templar. “Giants, in the form of alien-human hybrids known as the Nephilim, also form an important element of the Old Testament.”

Over to BurlingtonNews.net, then, a Wisconsin website that seems to pivot on “BUFO Internet Radio” and its stockpile of stories about flying saucers, ancient mysteries and that sort of thing. This is where ThothWeb got its info, and the picture too, apparently. The part it didn’t copy was about horns on heads signifying wisdom, leadership and descent from “either the Atlanteans or the Lemurians”, as BUFO suggests was the case with Michelangelo’s horned Moses.

Here, in among evidence of a “Super Race Cover-up”, we learn a bit more: Human skulls with two-inch horns were discovered in a burial mound at Sayre, Bradford County, Pennsylvania, in the 1880s, a giant, horned human skeleton near Elmira and Wellsville, New York, and another one outside El Paso, Texas. Then there was the 1996 UFO crash in Varginha, Brazil, whose diminutive occupants buzzed like bees, but from the artist’s rendering, the aliens’ horns were more like cornrow hairdos.

ReturnOfTheNephilim.com absolutely teems with evidence, or whatever it is, of a giant race, segments of it with horns.

“Very large” bones found in stone graves in Williamson County, Tennessee, in 1821; in White County, Tennessee, an “ancient fortification” with skeletons at least seven feet in length; giant skeletons found in the mid-1800s near Rutland and Rodman, New York; skull bones “of great size and thickness” discovered in mounds in the Kansas City area in 1877; a skeleton “of unusual size” in a mound in Ashland County, Ohio; in 1879, a nearly 10-foot skeleton in a mound near Brewersville, Indiana.

Utah, Minnesota, West Virginia, Arizona, California, Nevada, and on to Australia, where the “meganthropus” were between seven and 12 feet tall, and China’s “gigantopithecus blacki”, who could also have been 12 feet high. In Cumberland, England, a giant in armour 14 feet long.

“A living giant was sighted in the little village of Buffalo Mills, Pennsylvania, on August 19, 1973. A man at least nine feet tall strode down the main street of the village, dressed in strange clothing, which appeared to be made of some sort of shimmering material. He gazed at the startled townspeople in a dark, penetrating way and then loped off casually into oblivion.”

In the Philippines, a skeleton 17 feet long. In South Africa, a woman’s footprint more than four feet long carbon-dated at nine million years old — she would have been 30 feet tall.

Fun reading, but, um, no horns. Up next: PT Barnum!