English New Age, or paranormal, writer John Michell died 24 April 2009 of cancer. Born 9 February 1933 in London, England, he graduated from Eton, served in the Royal Navy as a Russian translator, and graduated from Cambridge. After trying the real estate business, he immersed himself in the hippie or underground movement and worked for countercultural publications. His first book, The Flying Saucer Vision: The Holy Grail Restored, came in 1967, and offered a new way of thinking about flying saucers, of which he said he had seen plenty.
Michell wrote widely of New Age and paranormal topics, and was an early proponent in making Glastonbury a center of New Age curiosities. In a 2007 Fortean Times interview, he talked about his first visit to the town, in 1966. “Strange lights in the sky, new music and our conviction that the world was about to flip over on its axis so that heresy would become orthodoxy and an entirely new world order would shortly be revealed.”
In 1971, in City of Revelation: On the Proportions and Symbolic Numbers of the Cosmic Temple, Michell explained that (according to The New York Times) “long ago, higher powers passed on the secrets of the numbers and geometric forms defining the shape of heaven to enlightened humans. These forms supposedly took earthly shape at holy places like Glastonbury, Stonehenge, and the pyramids. At these sacred sites, people could once again commune with natural rhythms, feel the pulsations of the earth force and participate in the rising of Atlantis.”
Michell’s official web site lists most of his books, including City of revelation: on the proportions and symbolic numbers of the cosmic temple (1977), Living Wonders: Mysteries and Curiosities of the Animal World (1982), The Story of George Adamski, the First Flying Saucer Contactee, and How He Changed the World (2001), Eccentric Lives, Peculiar Notions (2002), The Traveller’s Guide to Sacred England: A Guide to the Legends, Love and Landscape of England’s Sacred Places (2003), and more.