In comments, Tony M recommended Ted Holiday's The Goblin Universe to me as an interesting read. And I did enjoy the book, though I think I appreciated it more on the level of entertainment than actual evidence. As Colin Wilson admits in the introduction, the book would not convince anyone who has a skeptical cast of mind; the data presented are almost entirely anecdotal and can easily be written off as hoaxes or the delusions of gullible eyewitnesses.
The problem [writes Wilson] is that the reader needs to start out with a certain sympathy for these ideas. The Goblin Universe would never convert a single sceptic; in fact, it would probably make him more certain than ever that 'the occult' is a farrago of self-deception and muddled thinking. [pp. 28,29]
Nevertheless, the book does raise provocative and intriguing questions about the nature of reality. Wilson himself was so impressed with The Goblin Universe that he prevailed on the author's family to have it published posthumously, after Ted Holiday himself had chosen to leave it unpublished. Holiday may have been dissatisfied with the book because its conclusions are rather tentative; he sketches out a hypothesis that is at once elaborate and incomplete. Whether there is any merit to this hypothesis remains to be seen.
Before we get to that, let's look at the main subject matter of the book. Though The Goblin Universe covers a wide variety of phenomena, the author's principal concern is with what he calls "the phantom menagerie," the collection of beasties that have always been part of folklore and tabloid newspaper reports. Naturally, Bigfoot and Sasquatch and the yeti are here, as are mysterious big cats that come and go in the night, and the fairy folk, but Holiday's main interest is lake monsters, the most famous of which is the creature said to be inhabiting Loch Ness.
I learned a lot about this marginal area of zoological exploration in Holiday's book. For one thing, Loch Ness is by no means unique. Similar legends surround other lakes in Scotland, Ireland, and elsewhere. Moreover, I always pictured the Loch Ness monster as resembling a plesiosaur, a huge marine reptile* from the dinosaur age. But on the basis of the reports collected by Holiday, Nessie takes on a less attractive aspect. It is said to resemble a giant worm or slug with a horselike face. In some cases, it is reported to have multiple legs, like a centipede. Holiday speculates that the creature might have its origins as a prehistoric worm that channeled through the sedimentary deposits at the bottom of the lake, surfacing only infrequently.
He does not, however, believe that the present-day Loch Ness monster is an actual organic being. Instead, he regards it as something more akin to a "thought form," an image or idea that temporarily materializes or manifests itself in such a way as to be perceived by especially sensitive observers under just the right conditions. There is, in short, something otherworldly about the Loch Ness monster and, Holiday believes, something evil. He was so convinced of this fact that he engaged a professional exorcist to perform an exorcism of the loch. The aftereffects of this ritual, as described by Holiday, were extremely bizarre and involved the brief appearance of a "man in black," the archetypal figure often cited by ufologists. Indeed, Holiday believes there is a connection between UFOs and the phantom menagerie; UFOs, he thinks, are thought forms too.
And here is where his hypothesis comes in. He points us to the work of Harold Burr, former professor of anatomy at the Yale School of Medicine. For decades Burr investigated what he called "L-fields," short for "life-fields," which he saw as electrodynamic fields that organize all living systems. These fields, measured in millivolts, supposedly determine the structure and health of any living thing.
As Holiday summarizes,
L-fields, in fact, compel atoms and molecules to form appropriate shapes, and to keep the these shapes as individual cells die and need replacing. Instead of trial and error, Burr and his colleagues found perfect order. Every atom carries an electrical charge and is acted on by the field of the organism. A modification takes place between the field and the organism and vice versa, which has the authority of unfailing natural law. [p. 206]
Holiday carries Burr's work considerably further by speculating that the mind itself can directly affect L-fields. If this is so, and if L-fields are responsible for bringing together the constituents of living beings and organizing them into a coherent system, then the mind — or perhaps we should say Mind — operating through health fields, can create physical things.
Holiday writes:
But the essential point is that something nonmaterial — a thought in the mind of the operator or the dying reactions of a small experimental animal — [is] translated into measurable physical effects by no known means.
Perhaps we are now looking somewhat dimly at the real mechanism of evolution. To talk of the hit-or-this stupidity of chance mutations is as ludicrous as talking about a Creator making animals of clay. A far more subtle and effective method of modifying animals exists and it can be shown to exist — the effect of mind on matter….
We now see that plants and animals are under electronic control. And this control appears to be subject to further control from a timeless, nonmaterial agency loosely specified as mind, will, soul or spirit. This is not a matter of faith, but of scientific experiment. Evolution by selection does occur; but the selection is rational and intelligent. Far more subtle than any human intelligence, it is therefore extremely difficult to comprehend. Yet it has many attributes humans recognise in themselves. It enjoys the grotesque and even the horrifying. It is both spendthrift and immensely economical. It labors to perfect the seemingly impossible just for fun. Above all, it has an awareness of beauty in form and structure that dazzles the mind. If we try to probe a little deeper into the mystery of being, we find ourselves in the Goblin Universe along with Alice having tea with mad hares in top hats. [pp. 209-212]
In brief, then, the phantom menagerie, in Holiday's view, consists of entities that materialize and dematerialize out of physical constituents organized by L-fields, such fields in turn being directed by some mind or other. It is left unclear whether the mind in question is that of the observer, or God, or discarnate beings of a lower or higher nature, or some other source.
Now what are we to make of all this? Well, never having heard of L-fields before, I did little Googling. All I was able to determine is that the theory has been largely, if not completely, ignored by the scientific community. It has, however, embraced by some people interested in alternative medicine, such as homeopathy. There are even some dubious machines on the market that are said to improve your health by correcting defects in your L- field.
I'm not sure why Burr's work has been so completely neglected. He did, after all, have impressive credentials as a mainstream academic. I can think of two possible reasons. One is that his work verges on vitalism, an idea that is anathema to modern-day biologists. The other is that any phenomenon measurable only in millivolts is open to the objection of experimental error. Maybe the extremely feeble energies Burr measured in his experiments were an artifact of the measuring devices themselves and not part of the living systems he was scrutinizing.
If we assume, for argument's sake, that there really are such things as L-fields and that the mind can affect them, then perhaps we do have a reasonably satisfying, albeit sketchy, explanation for a variety of otherwise baffling phenomena. The idea of L-fields seems to tie in, to a certain extent, with the work of Rupert Sheldrake and his morphic fields. It may well be that some sort of energy field — whether electromagnetic or otherwise — lies at the heart of the phenomenon of life and perhaps even at the heart of the physical universe itself. And if the mind can be shown to influence such fields, we would have an answer to the most commonplace objection to dualism — namely, that an immaterial mind cannot interact with or affect a material reality.
The Goblin Universe
raises these questions in a consistently entertaining and even droll way. Not all of the evidence Holiday presents is equally credible, but I suppose that's the nature of this kind of material, which is inherently ambiguous and subjective. The book is certainly worth reading, as is Colin Wilson's extensive introduction, which runs more than 40 pages. At the end, you may find yourself less certain than ever about the line of demarcation between the objective and the subjective, and unlikely ever to go boating on Loch Ness.
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*Originally I wrote "a large marine mammal." An astute reader pointed out that plesiosaurs were not mammals. I knew this (I have a longstanding interest in dinosaurs and their seagoing relatives), but apparently I experienced a mental glitch. Anyway, I corrected the text on March 17.