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RECAP: ‘All questions pose more questions and all answers are ‘personal opinions -and the only sound rule and reply to lifts problems is to question nothing but to faa all situations with detachment.” EADE Layne, to review our premise, was best known among UFOlogists as the founder of Borderland Sciences Research Founda-tion (BSRF). He had an impressive metaphysical library and was a member of the Society of the Inner Light, one of several organizations that arose from the fragments of the seminal turn- of-the-20th-century ritual occult body called The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. layne’s successor, Riley Crabb, recently passed away, but Borderland Sciences continues as a foundation, publishing The Journal of Borderland Research (P. O. Box 6250, Eureka, CA 95502), with some emphasis on the link between the occult and UFOlogy. The Golden Dawn attracted a diverse membership: Gothic writers including Bram Stoker, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood were members, as were the famous occultists Aleister Crowley, S. L. Mathers and A. E. Waite, and poet W. B. Yeats. Founded upon certain cipher documents probably drafted by Kenneth Mackenzie and based on his earlier initiatory experiences with Continental Rosicrucian groups, the Golden Dawn in its wake spawned generations of occultists and, indeed, now has a number of (highly dubious) claimants to its mantle. Meade Layne was ahead of his time writing about the UFO phenomenon in the early 1940s, before the Kenneth Arnold case, as well as focusing on the more meta- physical aspect of the mystery with his patronage of trance channel Mark Probert. Probert himself merits some comment. In many ways his story resembles that of Richard S. Shaver, though Shaver always insisted that there was no metaphysical aspect to his stories of Dero, Tero and a hidden world beneath the surface of the Earth. Probert, even with Layne’s patronage, never made the extraordinary splash that Shaver did. Yet Shaver, through Ray Palmer, impacted on the highly skeptical world of science fiction fandom -then smaller and, I speak from personal knowledge, meaner-spirited than today. These fans ultimately rejected and forgot both Shaver and his sponsor, while Probert operated from a very early date in the metaphysical world on that thin line between occultism and contacteeism. The enduring impact of trance channeling on UFOlogy and, indeed, on all New Age consciousness is considerable. 49 Meape Layne, Mark PRosert AND THE INNER CIRCLE ManarajA NaTCHA OF THE INNER CIRCLE