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!
There’s more!

Something else besides a toastier Earth to look forward to in 2007 comes in September when the NASA peeper Cassini has another skid past Iapetus, #17 in Saturn’s seemingly endless brood of moons (33 and counting), and at 900 miles wide its third largest.

The spacecraft was last there on New Year’s Eve 2004 and got some drunken-college-girls snapshots that whetted appetites for more among the men of science and the men of pseudo-science, because either way you look at it, there are some remarkable features on this frosty globe named after the son of Uranus and father of the fathers of mankind, Prometheus and Atlas. Iapetus is Granddad to everyone on Earth.

This story is appealing to amateur geologists like me who got their start by breaking fingernails trying to pry apart factory-built earth globes along that equatorial ridge to see what was inside. Iapetus has one of those ridges, on the equator no less, and we’ve got a guy here named Richard Hoagland who’s sure it’s as hollow as those tin classroom globes.

One busy photographer everywhere in Saturn’s neighbourhood, Cassini is on a another sentimental journey as it returns to this specific moon: Iapetus was first spotted in 1671 by Jean-Dominique Cassini, France’s chief astronomer, after whom the shutterbug was named.

The 2004 pictures were tantalising but still too remote. Next autumn’s visit will produce images 100 times better.

For NASA, it looks like a lot of unusual volcanic activity was once going on there. For Richard Hoagland, who noisily continues to insist that the infamous “Face on Mars” is man-made, it looks like a lot of construction activity took place on Iapetus. His claims are amusing almost to the point of hilarity, but it’s wonderful to see how his mind works. Only the commercial aspect of his website stops me from saying, “Okay, Rich, let’s see more.” There’s more!

It’s reassuring, downright heartwarming, in fact, to discover that Michael Fairchild isn’t the only crazy person suggesting that the big tsunami was caused by something other than an earthquake. He must have got that stuff from someplace else, right? He’s a Hendrixologist — what does he know about geological phenomena?

It doesn’t take long to ferret out his cohorts in craziness. The sanely titled EcologyNews.com is mild enough in reporting that the would-be earthquake took place a mere 2.5 miles deep, but frets that “the exact depth of the ocean at the event site has been left out of every news report”.

A website with a trickier name, SurfingTheApocalypse.net, advises that “evidence for Sumatra 9.0 quake leans toward meteorite”. It seems to get this conclusion from a website with a name that ought to be reassuring, WhatDoesItMean.com.

This site has an analysis dated December 28, 2004, fast work by Sorcha Faal: “It is being reported that the depth was 10 kilometres. More importantly perhaps are the growing signs surrounding this event that rather than being caused by internal earth dynamics, as is being widely reported, it was instead caused by an extraterrestrial event, a meteorite strike into the ocean having come from the Southern Hemispheric skies.” There’s more!

God damn it, I missed a massive milestone in rock history three months ago when music fans around the world tearfully observed the 40th anniversary of Paul McCartney’s death. It wasn’t noted on CNN or even BBC so it slipped right by me, even when John Lennon devotees had their annual gathering outside the Dakota in New York in December.

But yeah, that “stupid bloody Tuesday” when vicious yet cute Beatle Paul stormed out of a recording session in a fit of pique, raced off in his Austin-Healey and “didn’t notice that the lights had changed” because he was distracted by the bluejaywalking” lovely Rita” on the sidewalk (she was later depicted as a blur on the back of “Abbey Road”) and crashed into a light pole, that was November 8, 1966.

He was, of course, pronounced dead on “Wednesday morning at 5 o’clock as the day begins” and nobody found out because the “Wednesday morning papers didn’t come”. At the funeral in Blackburn, Lancashire, Lennon read something or other biblical, George Harrison filled in the hole and Ringo was the walrus.

That’s what happened, but naturally Apple Corps went into hyperdrive to cover it up. They said, yes, a friend of McCartney’s wrecked his Mini Cooper in January 1967 and Paul had crashed his moped in December 1965, but that’s all, Paul is fine. Honestly, though, who was ever going to believe that Paul McCartney had either a moped or a Mini Cooper? There’s more!

In which Jimi Hendrix is blamed for the 2004 tsunami. Or something like that.

I have for months been putting off reading the entirety of James Sedgwick’s mammoth online screed headlined “A Declaration of Independence”, but the asteroid is getting closer by the minute and somehow Jimi Hendrix is involved. We have to get to the bottom of this. (The background is in Part 1.)

The Rock Prophecy website run by First Century Press is expanding as fast as that asteroid is approaching and its shrillness isn’t tapering off either. It sifts through the mainstream media reports about Apophis – the “asteroid craze” it says was actually generated by founder Michael Fairchild’s manuscript “Rock Prophecy”, not by a 1994 near-miss – and inserts snide remarks where the revelations should be.

It’s kind of hard to tell where James Sedgwick stops to breathe and Michael Fairchild takes over, but between them they’re hurling plenty of dangerous missiles into cyberspace. Dangerous, that is, if it wasn’t all so comical.

Now, let me see if I’ve got this straight:

* Michael Fairchild (pictured here, in a photo he seems to prefer) was the director-in-training of the official Jimi Hendrix production company and writing all the liner notes for the Hendrix CDs that MCA, Warner Bros and Polydor were releasing.

* Microsoft co-founder and Giant Hendrix Fan Paul Allen tapped Fairchild’s knowledge, then, out of jealousy, “destroyed” his career by persuading publishers to shun him. Fairchild’s book “Rock Prophecy” – “the most important explanation of civilisation”, Sedgwick incoherently calls it, was suppressed. Ah, but Amazon’s got it, and it’s available from his Rochester, NY-based website for $20 (allow two weeks for delivery).

* “Concepts from [the book] form the basis for stories like Da Vinci Code, and several TV programmes produced by Paul Allen.”

* Sedgwick is “seeking partners” to finance a series of movies based on Fairchild’s revelations about hurricane disasters, famine, soaring energy prices, what happened to all that tsunami-relief cash and NASA’s sudden change of heart about returning to the moon.

* NASA “made an unusual move” by renaming asteroid 2003 MN4 “Apophis” (the Greek word for “evil destruction”), but Hendrix knew this same asteroid as “Electric Love”. (It’s in the lyrcis! “I stand up next to a Mountain … Electric Love penetrates the sky … the Mountain falls in the sea, the Sun refused to shine”.)

* Jimi was born in 1942 at the exact same moment the Allies broke the Nazis’ Enigma machine code.

* When the second draft of “Rock Prophecy” was completed in August 1997, a huge triple rainbow appeared over Fairchild’s home.

* US Republicans quickly began labelling Democrats “elitists” after they saw how Fairchild used the term derogatorily in his 1988 “A Touch of Hendrix” manuscript.

* Washington had long planned an asteroid-deflection missile system but were going to tell taxpayers that, it’s okay, we’re aiming at North Korea, “a place that our State Department bribes into playing the role of ‘rogue nation’.” There’s more!