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I’ll begin with a word of explanation about the Nine that I mention in this article. They are not a group consisting of nine members, and they are not to be confused with the Council of Nine mentioned in The Stargate Conspiracy book (Lynn Pciknett & Clive Prince 1999). That book looks at the Council of Nine from many angles, including the possibility they might be a “government agency” creation and/or way of maipulating our opinions. However they began they’ve now become a cult whose belief is that they are in contact with non-human extraterestrail entities by means of telepathic, or channelled, communication. Some even claim they are the ancient Egyptian gods known as the Ennead.
But, while reading this article, it is worth bearing in mind the following quote from The Stargate Conspiracy (p. 204): “After all, few laymen realise what parapsychologists have known for years – that, strangely enough, belief and expectancy themselves actually create phenomena, rather than the other way around. It is the human mind that almost always creates the miracles, not as hoaxes or figments of the imagination, but actually ‘out there’ in the real world through the mysterious ability of psychokinesis. This can take many forms, from metalbending to healing the sick, even endowning inanimate objects with a temporary ‘consciousness.’”
Therefore, it’s worth noting that the messages from the Council of Nine have some distinct occult and mystical precursors. The idea also ties into the ones practiced by the magicians. For example, back in 1904 Alister Crowley believed that he was receving messages from an extratrestrial being called Aiwass. This led him to write his book The Book of Law, although he later decided that these messages had, in fact, come from his own subconscious mind.
It is also noteworthy that channelling is virtually identical to what used to be very popular in Victorian times, i.e. trance mediumship, in which the medium would receive messages from those who were supposedly dead.
But I digress. In this case the Nine were a group said to have conjured up the Cormons in very ancient times. In Nick Redfern’s book Three Men Seeking Monsters (2004) he alludes to them in a description he was given by a witch called Mother Sarah, who’s surname was Graymalkin (pp108-116). He met her, with two of his other friends, at her home near Falmouth, Cornwall. Unfortunately she is not listed in the local phone book so I’m not able to say exactly where she lived. However what she told him was that she believed the out-of-place creatures (cryptids) that are so often reported are apparitions that have similar characteristics to a Tulpa. She then proceded to tell the story of the Nine who had summoned these entities that were apparently called Cormons.
It transpires that the Cormons inhabit another dimension that, at times, is able to merge with our own, and some of the very ancient pagan peoples of Britain had the power to summon them up. She showed Nick a book that was: “a large leather-bound book adorned with the image of a goat-headed man and a giant wormlike creature wrapped around an oak tree on its front cover” and asserted that it had been in her family for generations. According to the book it seems that the Nine existed back in the 8th century A.D. They possessed occult powers and they also worked in association with a mysterious Irish group who were said to have summoned The Morrigan. The Nine believed that the Cormons could be used to protect the country from any future foreign invasion, and that they would be able to control these weird spectres.
So they set out to generate five different types of Cormon, and to call up The Morrigan. Today we would recognise these five categories in cryptid terms as being: sea monsters such as either our own Cornish sea serpent Morgawr (who you can read about here), or the Loch Ness Monster; Bigfoot, Yeti, or Sasquatch; Big Cats; Spectral Dogs; and grotesque looking flying creatures such as Thunderbirds, or Mothman and, once again, our own local Cornish Owlman (that you can also read about here). The book relates that the members of the Nine met at a circle of Standing Stones on Dartmoor and began to practise their occult skills in order to raise the Cormons and The Morrigan. However, after some days, they were all found massacred and gruesomely mutilated. Shortly afterwards stories began to emerge of strange sightings. It seemed that the Cormons had arrived, but nobody was left alive to control them. Since that time they have been seen not only in Great Britain but also across the world.
Mother Sarah proposed that they continue to appear and disappear according to people’s psychic ability to see them. And she added that they feed on our emotions, for example fear and hatred. She believed this was the reason why once the spectre is seen other sightings occur because their emotional feeding gives them the power to beome stronger. But she could not explain why the sightings would suddenly stop. She concluded her narrative by saying that she did not believe these creatures had anything to do with UFOs and aliens. She thought they were part of the old folklore, and that as society ceased to believe in, for example fairies, the Cormons had mutated into aliens.
One of the people that Nick Redfern was travelling with when he met Mother Sarah was the cryptozoologist Richard Freeman. And on the subject of these cryptids needing to feed Richard addresses the idea in an article entitled: In Search of British Dragons at:
http://www.mysteriousbritain.co.uk/fortean/british_dragons2.html
In the piece he states: “But looking at dragons as mortal flesh and blood creatures may be wrong. Perhaps they were something much stranger. Maybe the dragon exists as an entity in a reality different to our own. This would explain how they could appear, terrorize a community, and then vanish. We know that atoms vibrate at certain speeds. Could it be possible that there are entities composed of atoms that vibrate at a differing rate, slower or faster than the norm. Usually they would be invisible to us but under certain circumstances they, or us, could "speed up" or "slow down" becoming visible to each other for a short time?
Areas of intense Fortean phenomena are called window areas. Many of them were places of former religious importance that have now waned or fallen from use. Could the worship or occult use of an area over hundreds of years create a sort of artificial life form? Something that fed on the worship. When the worship is taken away the "thing" still needs to feed. It now feeds by creating fear with paranormal manifestations.
Several million years ago, our Australopithecine ancestors on the plains of East Africa had a struggle to survive. Our ancestors were being preyed upon by and were in competition with various formidable creatures. Crocodiles and pythons ate them as dig big cats, hunting dogs, and large birds of prey such as eagles. They competed against other primates such as giant baboons and other races of hominids some larger than them and some smaller.
All of these creatures can be slotted nicely into the universal monster template. There seems to be groups of monsters reported all round the world in every culture. These archetypes include dragons, giants, little people, monster birds, mystery big cats, and monstrous dogs. All of them have a direct link back to our ancestral horrors. Coincidence, I think not.”
For those of you who haven’t read Nick’s book I can highly recommend it and, obviously, you can read the whole story of the Cormons. He also makes a few other references to these creatures throughout the book when discussing other experiences he had while travelling through England seeking these elusive out-of-place monsters. It’s a book that once you’ve begun to read you’ll find extremely hard to put down.
If, like me, you don’t know very much about The Morrigan then here’s a brief outline of the Irish legend. The Morrigan is one of the paramount and most influential of the Celtic Goddesses. She was a goddess of life, war, and death, that reperesented the more violent side of the supernatural, the dark side of the earth mother. Her role was to make men go to war, and at times she herself would take part in the battles by shape shifting into a frightening apparition. Very often one such apparition would be that of a crow floating over the battlefield. The Morrigan was always invoked both before and during a battle. She would also appear to famous heroes when their life was in danger, especially on the day they were to die in battle. She was also said to have appeared in other guises such as an old crone, and a beautiful woman, but she was most recognised as a black crow.
And should you also be wondering what a Tulpa is, they are basically a thought-form. One of the most famous is that of a monk created by Alexandra David-Neel when she lived with the monks of Tibet during the late 19th Century. 
Regardless of the fact that a lama warned her that such things could become dangerous, and very hard to keep under control, she created a Tulpa after many months of effort. He appeared exactly how she had visualised him. But after a while she began to lose control of him, and he proved extraordinarily difficult to destroy. His appearance and attitude changed from that of being plump and cheerful into one of being lean and malevolent. In the end it took her around six months of mental focus and formal ceremonies to annihilate him.
There is also the legend of a Mexican shaman who educated Carlos Castaneda about the real nature of the material universe. He trained him in how to materialise things from thin air, to the extent that eventually Carlos was able to produce a living squirrel sitting in the palm of his hand.
Of course, the occult tradition also has its thought-forms, and the Theosophist tradition, founded by Madame H. P. Blavatsky, 
believes in three different types of thought-form. But in all of these the existence of whatever is produced relies on the force of the mind that made it. However, occasionally such a form may draw power from other sources to make itself totally free of the one who created it. Should it manage to do this then it can survive for a very long time.
One final example of a thought-form is that of “Philip” the ghost. In 1973 a group of Canadian paranormal investigators created a spirit with whom they actually managed to establish contact. Having invented a complete life history for him the ghost was able to answer all the questions set for him by the old rapping method of one knock for no and two knocks for yes. You can read all about this particular case here:
http://newdawnmagazine.com/Article/How%20to%20Make%20a%20Ghost.html
Although unrelated with both the Cormons and The Morrigan being able to change their shape, I was drawn to other stories of shape shifting. These other stories concern Shape Shifters and SkinWalkers.
There is a belief that a Skinwalker is a witch who can change their shape into an aminal, often that of a dog-like creature, and that immortality is also amongst their supernatural powers. The magical way in which this might be achieved is described at the following link:
http://www.whitedragon.org.uk/articles/sacredspace.htm
Where it says that: “In witchcraft, both traditional craft and modern forms of wicca, also in certain forms of Ritual Magick, there is the idea that during a magickal rite some kind of energy is produced by those taking part. In witchcraft this is most commonly visualised as a Cone of Power, and is named such. Built inside the magick circle, often created by wild and frenzied dancing around the boundary of the sacred space. Drumming, chanting or sexual activity are other ways this energy can be built and maintained. The energy thus formed can be shaped and directed in accordance to the Will of the Coven or Lodge, becoming in effect a thought form or elemental, formed from the element of spirit (or mind). At the end of the rite when the circle is opened, some kind of psychic seal is broken and the power containing the focused Will of its creators shoots out into the world, where the spell takes effect, causing the change Willed by the Coven etc. In this instance sacred space is being used to contain power while its being built and programmed.”
This particular belief can be found in cultures around the world, all of which are strongly associated with witchcraft and the idea of weird animals. One such culture is the Navajo Indians who have an extremely well documented belief in Skinwalkers. They call such beings “yenaldooshi” and believe them to be evil because they achieved their power by breaking some cultural taboo. The Navajo describe them as appearing at night, to disseminate great despondency, even death and disaster, and they usually take the form of a coyote or other animal. It would seem that the Navajo Skinwalkers are performing a type of black magic, albeit one that has no connection to the type of magic found in Europe.
Other cultures include: the Mohawk Indians who occaisionally use the word “limikkin” to depict all types of Skinwalkers; the Hopi Indians who used to carry out a ritual called the “Ya Ya Ceremony” in which they wore animal skins to gain the characteristics of whatever animal they’d chosen. And, according to Norse mythology a Skinwalker was someone who could change shape in order to not only take on the traits of the animal who’s shape they’d taken on, but also to travel in that shape so that they could discover secrets.
Along the same lines as the shapeshifters and Skinwalkers perhaps we can add the Shadow People. These are, apparently, entities that are usually seen out of the corner of your eye. The experience is an extremely short one, although there are a few reports of people seeing these strange beings for longer than would be normal. However, the interesting part of the reports is how many people say that they have seen glowing red eyes during the incident. The same is also very often reported in cryptid sightings. In fact it seems to be a theme that runs through many strange sightings, including UFO and paranormal ones. So, while aliens and ghosts could be interdimensional beings, or aliens could be time travellers, some people believe that daemons are responsible for all of the phenomena.
Another feature that is sometimes reported during strange sightings is that of smelling sulphur, or ozone. And this may be commensurate with the energy required to produce the sighting. You can read an interesting snippet about this idea at the following link:
http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/UFOs/ufosulphur.htm
With regard to the paranormal, and ghosts in particular, there are are almost as many theories as there are believers. But one that is appealing is that of the Stone Tape idea. And perhaps, in some way, it could also have some bearing on cryptid, UFO, and alien sightings.
One of the best descriptions of the theory is in Will Storr’s book: Will Storr Vs. The Supernatural (2006 Ebury Press) (pp. 46-7). The author meets Stephen The Druid who tells him that the Stone Tape theory is all to do with iron. Stephen The Druid says that: “We know that ferric oxide or chromium dioxide can record information. We use this process in everyday things like videos, cassettes, things like that. Now, iron is everywhere in nature. It holds information, if it’s magnetised in the right way. So, very probably, ghosts are just repeats of information that is stored in natural iron. It’s as if someone’s rewound the tape and just played it again.”
Later in the book Will Storr meets (p. 145) Philip Hutchinson, a senior Ghost Club member. Hutchinson has two theories, which are that: “The first is the Stone Tape theory, which Stephen the Druid told me about. And the second involves time-slips. Apparently Einstein’s theory of relativity says that time isn’t linear, but all twisted up like a ball of wool. So, if we’re all barrelling up and down and around and around in these tangled woolly time-strands, it’s possible to rub up against a strand from a completely different era, like the sixteenth century, or the twenty-seventh, and when this happens, information can leak through. Thus ghosts.’”
But wherever these things come from, it is in the end probably all to do with how our consciousness perceives them. Some researchers propose that thought-forms, aliens, UFOs, cryptids, ghosts, may be outward forms of things that exist in the collective unconscious. Perhaps in some way they are representations of Archetypes.
In Jungian psychology there are four main types of Archetypes, these are:
The Self
The Shadow
The Anima
The Animus
Basically these are inherited mental images, forming part of the collective unconscious, which can be employed to understand what has been experienced.
According to Jung, archetypes were mental organs that were equivalent to physical ones, and that both are morphological conditions that occurred in the course of evolution. You can find a description of the Archetypes that Carl Jung suggested in the online Wikipedia dictionary at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archetype
Here, it is The Shadow Archetype that might play a part in the observation of these strange creatures. 
Jung tell us that The Shadow is a part of the unconscious mind that is strange and distasteful to the conscious mind, and contains thoughts that have been suppressed by the conscious persona. It is, of course, far more complicated than that, but space doesn’t allow a fuller explanation. However, Jung maintained that there was more than one layer to The Shadow. Beneath the top layer lies the absolute unconscious that is completely separate from personal experience. He called it: “a psychic activity which goes on independently of the conscious mind and is not dependent even on the upper layers of the unconscious - untouched, and perhaps untouchable - by personal experience.” He also referred to it as the collective unconscious, and suggested that this particular Archetype occasionally controls a person’s behaviour during traumatic situations.
There is a very long, but very interesting article entitled: Consciousness that Transcends Spacetime:its Significance for the Therapeutic Process by Dr. Andrew Powell in which he discusses Freud and Jung. 
A very small quote from the piece says that: “Sigmund Freud’s great discovery was to realize how much of perceptual reality is shaped by the content of our projections, and to be able to trace their source. He showed that mind is busy constructing a world out of impulses, fears and desires, even though it may consciously know surprisingly little about them. While Freud was unaware of the implications of quantum theory, he intuited what the new physics was later to reveal – there is no such thing as reality that stands apart from the observer. ……….. Unlike Freud, Carl Jung postulated a Self that was unconfined by the personal, in line with his sense of the deep connectedness between all things. Throughout his life, Jung sought to accommodate supernatural and extrasensory phenomena and was intrigued by the psychophysical implications of quantum theory. Now that quantum theory is beginning to make a wider impact, Jung’s ideas, having been relegated to the back shelf by much of the psychotherapy community, are coinciding with advances in consciousness studies.” You can find the whole essay here:
www.rcpsych.ac.uk/college/sig/spirit/publications/powell_CTTS.pdf
Or maybe we’re completely on the wrong track and it’s all down to the Cosmic Joker!
Regardless of who, or what, the Cosmic Joker actually is it is highly skilled at organizing everything at once while remaining endlessly creative. Although, of course, when considering real life the obstacle to this is as Schopenhauer pointed out: “the fate of one individual invariably fits the fate of another, so that each is the hero of his own drama, while simultaneously figuring in a drama foreign to him.” Schopenhauer thought that it exceeded our ability to understand.
However, to some small degree Zen Buddhism might help us to get a handle on the Comsic Joker. In a book entitled: The Chinese Mind, by E. R. Huges, he portrays Zen Buddhism as being: “consciously and deliberately paradoxical, even with the intention of causing laughter, to make evident the incongruities of the human situation.” There is, obviously, a differentiation between appreciating a cosmic joke and having a paranoid reaction to one. Appreciating it acknowledges its irrationality and sees its funny side, whereas showing paranoia gives it a detrimental significance. But whatever our reaction, a cosmic joke confronts our assumptions and expectations, and makes us think about the mysteries of our reality.
Finally, to return to the Cormons and the fact that the only information I can find about them seems to have originated in Cornwall. It is interesting to note that there is an ancient Cornish legend, called Jack the Giant Killer, about a Giant called Cormoran. Not only is there a similarity in name, but this mythical figure was also gigantic. Briefly, he was said to have built and lived on St. Michael’s Mount with his wife Cormelian. Having terrorised the surrounding area he was eventually killed by a local farmer’s son called Jack. You can read the full account of the legend here:
http://www.mysteriousbritain.co.uk/legends/cormoran.html
And a slightly fuller version of the story here:
http://www.connexions.co.uk/culture/html/legends.htm
Whatever the truth of the Cormons these types of myths are global, so they must have started somewhere. Personally, I don’t believe that ancient legends just sprang to life fully formed. For me it makes far more sense that originally they were all based on some real facts. But do I beileive in the Cormons? Well, I live in deepest, darkest Cornwall. What do you think?