Science purports to offer us a coherent worldview. It does not. There remain a thousand gaps and contradictions. But we compartmentalize, throwing some disruptive tidbits into 'religion' and others into 'art' or we simply indulge in the willful suspension of knowing. We ignore what we have seen; we pretend facts away. The rewards for doing so are enormous - society pats us on the head ('good sheep'); we sleep well and deeply; we may consign frights to horror writers or madmen and never have to confront them in our waking hours.

But precisely such offensive horrors lurk in these pages, waiting to confront you, disclosed here with facts and photos, details and history. They will creep into your nightmares, and linger into your waking day. That haunted, haggard look from sleepless nights is the price you pay to enter, to open the gate, to rouse from the Common Delusion, to read on.

I do not offer comforting illusions or speculation or narrative of what we fear is so or wish were not, but unlovely truth with all its horns and hooves, a bright light on a dark night of beasts - vampires, witches, werwolves, who heed the same science you do, disobey the same laws, gnaw the same bones. Here Jean LeDoux reveals his kin; here you find arcana and testimony; not human, but vampire. The pounding you hear in these pages - the hammer on the anvil - is the beating of world's bosom. The surging you sense is levin in the air, molten iron in the forge, magma throbbing in the earth's veins. These are basic truths, but not meant for the faint of heart.

Thirty years ago, I met Jean LeDoux - Sandman - in Colorado. Among other tasks, he vets unfolding science and technology for his own master, Saragossa. In pursuit of this end, he became a friend of my father's - friend and colleague, for my father was a physicist with ideas that interested Jean (ethers redux). Slowly Jean and I became, perhaps, - as I permit myself to think - friends, independent of my father. You cannot meet Jean without instantly knowing yourself in the presence of a Power, a mystery, a hidden master. But only over years did he, for reasons of his own, reveal to me his true nature - that he is vampire . This I did not easily accept, despite the preparation of his 'otherworldly' personality, and the casual demonstration of his inhuman strength. But even a scientist must, however reluctantly, acknowledge reality when he sees it over and over again, and I have seen what cannot be - not in the world in which I sprouted - seen and sensed, metered and measured. I was forced to stop 'unseeing' what didn't mesh with Received Wisdom, the Common Reality. It is not a comfortable or comforting step to take.

So I swallowed the indigestible kernels of reality he fed me. I journeyed from absolute disbelief to tremulous uncertainty. When I could no longer endorse even doubt, I was taken with a dawning horror as the veil was ripped from my eyes, as I realized how tenuous is our reality, how vulnerable our security, how fragile our human lives, how replete the world is with horrors. Later these secrets became a burning burden. I harbored, under the sigil of silence, the proof of a subterranean world of nightmare, hidden from daylight dwellers, the ignorant and the innocent. How I yearned to yell, to shout it out, to share, to enlighten, to wake up the children. How I yearned simply not to be alone in my knowledge. Later still came the bare-knuckled anger at the stupid, unknowing, self-complacency infesting the warrens of nine-to-five, the liver too full, perforated, bursting. The bourgeois self-assured, the many and the many-legged mob. This was, perhaps, no more than self-loathing of my own former intellectual arrogance, my unyielding certainty in the world of high school physics. Or maybe simple frustration at not being able to share, to show and tell, to write.

And finally, at length, after endless years of waiting, comes permission, imprimatur, nihil obstat. Sandman's simple "yes, you may publish." I have manuscripts I wrote in 1976 that I thought would never be seen by human being. So here, in these pages, is what I have ached to relate.

Simply, here is the reality of the "wer" kindred - werwolves, wer-bats, wer-jaguars - their origin and history; the disease that makes them wer; the truth in the myths - the substance in the mists of legend, not hypothesis but knowledge, facts from the lips of a native of the night. The informant is an ultimate authority, a vampire, Sandman himself.

There has been so much misinformation printed about vampires, and about magic. This site exists to correct some of those misimpressions. Here, for the first time to my knowledge, is made public the true history of wer-animals (their 'covert history') from their original appearance as the Egyptian pantheon 5,000 years ago, through the great detour into Meso-America to their final flowering in Europe and North America. Here also is precise information about the nature of the wer disease, the bio-molecular basis of metamorphosis from human to animal, the powers and limitations of wer, the origins of many of the myths surrounding vampires and werewolves, the great wer players and their politics and relations with humans, and the nature and rules of the magic which is so closely associated with those powerful beings. Finally, here are also, for the first time, to my knowledge, photos - clear, specific, and frank - of vampires, in their human form.

The wer-kindred - "wer," also spelled "were", is an old English word meaning man and is related to the Latin "vir" as in virile or triumvirate. So werwolf (as those I know write it) or werewolf (as Hollywood writes it) means man-wolf or wolfman, as wer-bat means vampire. All the wer-animals represent the same phenomenon - a human into whose chromosomes a second genome - an animal's genetic blueprint - has intruded via a viral vector.