Maverick journalist, John Michell 1933-2009

John Michell’s enjoyable book Eccentric Lives and Peculiar Notions had "one striking omission", said the Guardian: its author was not among its entries. A maverick journalist and self-styled modern Merlin, Michell (pronounced Michelle), who has died aged 76, was perhaps best known for writing The View Over Atlantis, which argued that ancient sites were built on invisible, interconnecting lines of mystical energy.

When published in 1969, it was described as "one of the dottiest books to have appeared for some while". But it has since been hailed, by those with an interest in such things, as the most important volume of its kind. As for Michell, it was never easy to tell the extent to which he privately believed the views he aired in public. "My own chosen attitude is total confusion," he once confessed.

John Michell was born in London, the son of a landowner, and educated at Eton, where he excelled at art. But that was the limit of his academic success: at Cambridge, he didn’t even manage a Third. Soon after, he lost most of his inheritance in property deals. Michell became a charming drop-out, smoking pot at his home in Notting Hill and immersing himself in mystic lore.

On a visit to Glastonbury in 1966, he was impressed by "strange lights in the sky, new music, and [the] conviction that the world was about to flip over on its axis". His first book, published in 1967, combined Arthurian myth with theories about UFOs. His second was The View Over Atlantis.

In later life, Michell founded The Cerealogist, a magazine devoted to the study of crop circles. But his interests extended further than the New Age syllabus, said the New York Times. He once published a collection of Hitler's pithy sayings (it was not widely reviewed) and he wrote a humorous monthly opinion column in The Oldie.

In 2006 he surprised friends and family by marrying Denise Price, the archdruidess of the Glastonbury Order of Druids. Their wedded bliss only lasted two months, however. After that, Michell said, "she threw me out". ·