The 2ndth Pan Book of Horror Stories (1973)

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While many of Pan's horror collections dealt with typical horror fare – the supernatural, the black arts, and murder – The 2ndth Pan Book of Horror Stories, published in Scarfolk in 1973, collected stories about the most fearful abomination in all of creation: mankind.

Mankind was the only organism to top both the government's list of greatest threats and its list of most endangered species and it's very likely there was a correlation.

Scarfolk Council was particularly keen to emphasise the potential rarity, thus value, of humans. It had bred thousands of useless people in a secret eugenics experiment, which had run out of funds, and needed to sell off the surplus to recoup some of its losses.

Unfortunately, the council flooded the market. By 1975, a small group of nondescript humans could be picked up for as little as £25 and as the decade drew to a close charity shops were full of them. Eventually, a landfill site was opened and the council gave all the unwanted people the bus fare that would take them to their final resting place.

Scarfolk Mail Rub-On-Transfer News

In the early 1970s, local newspapers changed their publishing strategies. They stopped thinking of readers as interested parties keen to learn the latest news from objective sources. Instead, they thought of them as clients who consumed news to suit their lifestyles and, consequently, their unwavering ideologies.

Censoring and slanting facts soon degraded into outright fabrication and readers became conditioned to see only information that pandered to and confirmed their negative biases, so much so that newspapers such as the Scarfolk Mail realised that they no longer needed to provide actual content: Readers only saw what they wanted to see and comprehended what they wanted to comprehend.

Consequently, in 1972, the Scarfolk Mail started publishing editions with little or no content. Instead, it provided sheets of rub-on-transfers should the reader want to fill in the columns with their own jaundiced content. The Scarfolk Mail went on to win a prize for best reportage of the year, as voted by readers.

Identified Flying Objects (& Esoteric Truth)

In the 1970s, the distinction between fact and fiction completely broke down as a result of years of government fabrications, corporate deceit, media falsehoods and systematic educational disinformation.

Objective truth gained an esoteric, almost occult status along with subjects such as ghosts, bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, pagan paediatrics and other unexplained phenomena. Many didn't believe that objective truth even existed.

The dwindling numbers of people who insisted that real facts were 'out there' were pushed to the fringes of society and labelled conspiracy theorists. They saw it as their duty to promote even the most rudimentary facts and reintroduce them into the public arena.

One area of so-called "arcane knowledge" concerned IFOs (Identified Flying Objects), which eventually caught the public imagination, or rather the lack of it. Sensationalised books and magazines about the topic flooded newsagents and bookshops (see pages above and below from The IFO Phenomenon (Corgi, 1977) and a pull-poster from IFO Monthly magazine). By the end of the decade, many people claimed to have had a "close encounter" with an IFO. Some even reported that they had been taken aboard such craft.

 

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For more information about the suppression of facts in public discourse, see the Truth Reform Act of 1976 and mandatory de-education classes.