The truth of it

Visitors’ Book Rendlesham Forest. a decompositon, Peter Dent

(£6.00, 47pp, Knives, Forks and Spoons Press)

Like, wow. This man has seen the aliens, too. Rendlesham Forest, December 1980. He’s scared of saying too much about it though, the stories and poems in here deflect questions, mirror what we already know, and allude to elsewhere and nowhere. Paranoid conspiracy theories abound: ‘the facts of the night in question speak highly of institutional involvement’. Well, of course they do!

We know from Twin Peaks, Star Trek, The X-Files, and many other TV programmes, not to mention writings about Roswell and other hush-hush sites that something else is out there, something else sometimes visits Earth, but we’re not supposed to know. Peter Dent grapples with alignments, deconstructing and reading between the lines of the few documents in the public domain, and eye-witness reports. ‘Seldom have UFO reports produced such a catalogue of event and detail, and with such a huge cast of witnesses: civilian, military and police. If accounts differed in one respect or another, there was no denying their impact as a whole,’ he writes. But of course those in uniforms were debriefed, told what to say, their reports amended, their dissent silenced, and the public fobbed off. Nothing ever changes.

So UFO-logy gets sidelined and put with myth and folklore, delusion and madness. It’s good that Dent has reclaimed it here though, and gone public with his mix of poems and prose that ‘pinpoint sites of rural disinformation without snagging the tape.’ Yet he unravels that tape to reveal the present within: both the gift of knowledge and the now of time. It’s taken him nearly 40 years to find the creative force to break through an irrational fear and silence, to find the bravery to publish. But now he has, with these ‘tremblings of analysis’ and ‘the bright lights of other’.

This is important, insightful, visionary writing, even if in the scheme of things it is only ‘an un-puzzled blink’. This should be on your shelves alongside The Illuminatus! Trilogy, William Burroughs, Jenkins Smart, Hawkwind, Gregogory Feist, Babe Rainbow, J. Allen Hynek,, Thee Faithfull Skolars of Zero, China Mieville, Sun Ra, Oku Onuoara, Chrome and Antonin Artaud; filed under G for genius! Recommended for all poets, sceptics, sky warriors, space visitors, time tourists and mind travellers.

Johnny Brainstorm