S. D. Tucker – författare

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.

Join Steven Tucker on this unique exploration of the myths and legends, and the tales of the fantastic that are supposed to have happened along the Mersey's shores. Some are just stories; but others apparently have some kind of truth behind them, from pig-killing poltergeists, to tales of Spring-Heeled Jack, to the 'great leprechaun invasion' of 1964. Some are funny, and others are terrifying. Others, such as claims that both Adolf Hitler and Jack the Ripper were one-time Liverpudlians, are nothing more than attention-seeking urban legends. Paranormal Merseyside not only deals with hauntings, UFO sightings and legends from the city of Liverpool itself, though; the surrounding towns and settlements, places like Widnes, Runcorn, St Helens, the Wirral, Frodsham, Rainhill, Southport, Formby, Newton-Le-Willows and Warrington, are also included.