Set the controls for the heart of the sun… Perfect Water: The Rebel Imaginos is here.

Sandy Pearlman had made clear that his Imaginos writings explained the occult origins of World War I. But he was less clear on the occult origins of World War II, almost as if he was conflicted about the extension.

In Perfect Water: The Rebel Imaginos, Blue Öyster Cult biographer Martin Popoff presents the theory that the reason there are so many curious extraterrestrial references across the BÖC canon is that Pearlman was as much concerned with where Imaginos was going as he was with where he’d come from.

Popoff proposes that the deeper steganographic meaning - hidden in plain sight - of Pearlman’s cryptic tale was in fact about Imaginos escaping the bidding of the Old Ones to kill and kill again, beginning in 1939, across a Second World War. Tearing apart the band’s lyrics, myriad patterns emerge, with a story shaped around a three-pillared approach to the creation of a rend in the psychic fabric large enough for egress.

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More from the back cover of the new book…

In a whirlwind of words and pictures that is ten times weirder and darker than the wildly speculative and conspiratorial Flaming Telepaths; Imaginos Expanded and Specified, four-time Blue Öyster Cult author Martin Popoff draws fever-dreamed connections between Sandy “Memphis Sam” Pearlman’s legendary Imaginos writings of 1967 (along with other BÖC lyrics) to tumultuous world events mostly after the end of World War I.

At an action-packed pace, Popoff connects the Imaginos saga to Egyptology, Ignatius Donnelly and his Atlantean studies, Russian cosmism, Rasputin, Tennyson, Charles Dellschau and the Victorian-era airship mystery, George Ellery Hale, Augustus Le Plongeon, hollow earth theory, telluric currents, Alice in Wonderland, H.P. Lovecraft, theosophy, Edgar Cayce, the Cliff House, Boleskin House, upstate New York spiritualism, The Wizard of Oz, Kenneth Grant, Antarctic military bases, Hans Kammler, Wernher von Braun, Jack Parsons, Marjorie Cameron, Godzilla, myriad UFO events, the Kennedy assassination, the Process Church, the Necronomicon, John and Yoko in Egypt, the Very Large Array, CERN, HAARP and the lyrics of The Stranglers.

And forging further connectivity to Flaming Telepaths, there is more on Aleister Crowley, Austin Osman Spare, World War II and the key birthright and developmental milestones in the life of Imaginos in the 1800s and early 1900s. Flash forward, once we’re into the 1970s, entries on the Blue Öyster Cult albums emerge and the connections multiply and clarify.

All the while a consistent narrative worms its way through the march of time and its dizzying geopolitical markers, and that is the tale of Imaginos’ quest to quit the bidding of the sea-dwelling Old Ones and return to his planet of origin, through science—be it earthly or extraterrestrial—or by occulted magic.