Wilkins, Harold T.

Harold T. Wilkins (1891—1960) was a British journalist and amateur historian.

[edit] Biography

Educated at Cambridge University in journalism, Wilkins regularly reported on the early television experiments of John L. Baird, during the years 1926—1932. In middle life he published works on the history of piracy, and on the history of the British public schools. He was a particularly prolific writer on the subject of "pirate treasure" and other sea legends, in works such as Captain Kidd and his Skeleton Island (1937), Panorama of Pirate Treasure (1940) and Mysteries and Monsters of the Deep (1948).

After 1947 and the earliest "flying saucer" sighting by Kenneth Arnold, he became fascinated with the saucer phenomenon and plunged into extensive historical research in the style of Charles Fort, eventually producing two Fortean saucer books which were widely read during the 1950s, Flying Saucers on the Moon (1954) and Flying Saucers Uncensored (1955), better known under its US title, Flying Saucers on the Attack. Wilkins invites comparison with two other British Fortean authors who were his contemporaries, Desmond Leslie and W. Raymond Drake. While Drake patiently dug through ancient literature and legend to find "evidence" of ancient astronauts, Wilkins dug through ancient literature and legend to find "evidence" of earlier sightings of flying saucers. Leslie preferred to mine the bogus "ancient" literature of Theosophy.

Wilkins also published a number of works in the "ancient mystery" vein, influenced by Theosophy and the myth of Atlantis, including Mysteries of Ancient South America (1945), Secret Cities of Old South America (1952), and Mysteries of Time and Space (1958).

In the September 1929 issue of Popular Mechanics an article by Harold T. Wilkins titled "Secrets of Ancient Torture Chambers" describes the [fictitious] shrinking torture chamber at the Tolfi castle in Sicily as an example of an ancient torture chamber and proposes a mechanical model to account for the contracting action of the chamber.^[1] The shrinking torture chamber at Tolfi castle is described in the short story "The Iron Shroud" by William Mudford.

Wilkins is the subject of a song by the London-based band Fanfarlo, entitled "Harold T. Wilkins, or How to Wait for a Very Long Time," on their full-length LP Reservoir.

[edit] References

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