Nazi UFOs tells the strange tale of how, following the first alleged flying saucer sightings made in the USA in 1947, a series of fantasists and neo-fascists came forward to create a media myth that the Nazis may have invented these incredible craft as a means for winning the Second World War, a plan which was tantalisingly close to completion before the Allies conquered Berlin in 1945. Today, the fantasy of Nazi UFOs has grown into an entire mythology in books, on TV and online. Did Germany back-engineer anti-gravity craft, and even a full-blown time-machine, by stripping technology from a crashed alien saucer? Did the SS secretly invent Green' technology for use in their star ship engines, and was this planet-saving discovery later suppressed at the behest of a sinister Big Oil conspiracy? Did Himmler try to develop lightning weapons' for use in aerial combat? By contrasting the fake military-industrial pseudo-histories of Nazi UFO theorists with details of real-life Nazi aerospace achievements, the author demonstrates both how this modern-day mythology came about and how it cannot possibly be more than fractionally true. For the first time, this fake alternative military history' is laid out in full. This book features an appealing cast of con-men and spies, complete madmen, real-life Nazis and completely made-up ones, operating right across the globe from South America to wartime Europe and Japan. A good example may be the mad professor', Viktor Schauberger, who actually genuinely did manage to gain a personal audience with Adolf Hitler in order to try and convince him that he had discovered and then exploited some amazing new source of natural free energy' which could make objects (such as saucers, in the opinion of some) float. Hitler dismissed his plan, but it does nonetheless show how close some bizarre schemes came to being implemented in Nazi Germany.

If only the war had lasted another six months, then Hitler would have won ... because his scientists stood upon the very brink of inventing flying saucers. That, at least, is the myth as it is currently being peddled today, in books, pamphlets and online; and, if it were true, squadrons of Luftwaffe spacecraft would certainly have made mincemeat out of British Spitfires and American B-52s. But, of course, it is a complete fiction. And yet the sinister myth of Nazi UFOs is surprisingly well developed. If you listen to its champions, escaped Nazis and their indoctrinated offspring are simply hiding in secret Antarctic bases, inside the Hollow Earth, somewhere upon another planet, or even within another dimension, just waiting for the right time to strike again - and this time, armed with saucers and in close alliance with Aryans from other star systems, they stand poised to finish what they started. Some even claim that Hitler and his chief henchmen did not really die in 1945, but were borne away in spirit on flying saucers. Such theories seem insane - but do they have a hidden purpose? White supremacists around the globe have adopted Nazi ufology to draw the gullible into the wider orbit of Far-Right ideology; after all, if the standard version of history is so wrong as to fail to acknowledge that Hitler helped invent UFOs, then what else might historians have got wrong about the Third Reich? Might the Nazis actually have been right all along? Could the Holocaust have been a total hoax? Once they have swallowed the first lie, a person might easily swallow several others. The stories in this book are bizarre: Nazi saucer-pilots fighting alongside Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War; alien boot-prints whose soles bear swastikas being found in the wake of UFO-landings; the leader of America's Nazi Silvershirts claiming to be in psychic contact with men from other galaxies; and Allied pilots being buzzed by fiery glowing 'foo fighters' during the Second World War. They may seem harmless at first, but they are not. Is it really the white race's destiny to conquer the icy reaches of space under the banner of the 'Aryan world spirit'? Perhaps not, but the conquest of their victims' inner space, not outer space, in the name of Hitlerism is what these latter-day Goebbels truly desire.

The Trickster-god is a strange and rather wonderful mythological figure who is found in folklore and legend right across the world, from the Norse Loki to the Greek Hermes to the Raven and Coyote of the Native American peoples. The ultimate 'cunning fool', he and the many subversive tales told about him have been studied down the years by anthropologists, historians, literary theorists and psychologists from Ted Hughes to C. G. Jung. But in the twenty-first century, should the Trickster also be studied by parapsychologists and ghost hunters? Nobody believes in gods like Hermes or Loki anymore, but that does not mean that people do not still tell one another tales about such Tricksters and their mischievous ways. They do, but in disguised form - the disguised form of the poltergeist. Belief in Trickster-gods, this book argues, has today been transformed into popular belief in Trickster-ghosts, with those noisy, disruptive, roguish spirits known as poltergeists fulfilling largely the same imaginative function as more traditional Trickster-figures like Robin Goodfellow once did. By playing childish tricks upon us, poltergeists appear to reveal our current world-view to be in some way incomplete, breaking the accepted circles of 'official' materialistic, scientific logic and provoking laughter at their irreverent audacity in doing so. Rather than being intended to frighten, perhaps the true purpose of certain ghost stories is in fact to amuse, perplex and provoke? Whether true or not, such ghost stories still function as genuine Trickster-myths, providing those who read them with access to a hidden realm lurking somewhere just beyond the rational, in which the usual rules of science, logic and reality simply do not apply. Perhaps in doing so they act as a kind of 'emotional safety-valve', intended to allow mankind temporary respite from the sometimes oppressive social forces surrounding us. Covering a wide global selection of reported poltergeist phenomena from ancient times right up to the present day, and then subjecting them to a process of literary, historical and sociological analysis, Blithe Spirits is one of the most unusual, original and wide-ranging books about the subject ever to be written.

Who, these days, still believes in goblins? Well surprisingly, millions of people do, right the way across the countries of southern Africa, where such creatures are known as tokoloshes. Little known in the West, these entities - hairy little men with gigantic magical penises and the ability to turn themselves invisible through the aid of an enchanted pebble - are a matter of everyday belief in nations such as South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Lesotho. In this, the first ever full-length book to be published upon the topic in the West, the consequences of this bizarre belief are explored in immense detail. It is not just that poltergeist-hauntings and UFO-sightings are blamed upon the activities of this nefarious little imp; so are everyday misfortunes such as a person's lack of success in love or business. Rather more outlandishly, tokoloshes are also held responsible for supposedly raping innocent women in their beds at night and then impregnating them with goblin-children; court cases have arisen in which people have been accused of murdering such unfortunate infants whilst under the genuine impression that they were evil tokoloshe-babies. But this is not all - tokoloshes have also been linked with witchcraft, zombies, paranormal stone-showers, murder, ancient Trickster-gods, sightings of unknown animals and outbreaks of mass hysteria. In no other book can you read about topics as diverse and strange as haunted toilets, killer one-eyed Cyclops-men made from porridge, severed penises being used as magical batteries and a deformed baby goat born with the head of Homer Simpson. All this, and the full uncensored tale of the man who claimed to have been molested in the night by a big gay hippo-monster ... Lavishly illustrated and all fully-referenced, this book is not only filled with dozens of unusual, amusing and hitherto-unexamined real-life stories, it also tries to place prevailing contemporary southern African belief in the tokoloshe into some kind of plausible social context. The tokoloshe may not be a genuinely real creature, but it certainly occupies a position of social reality in the minds of those who believe in it - with truly wide-ranging and often unexpected consequences.