Book Reviews

Communion was one of the two books back in the late 80's that brought the face of the grey alien into popular culture. Strieber took a lot of heat for his story, from both sides of the tracks. Believers in the Extra-Terrestrial Hypothesis attacked him for claiming that he didn't believe that was necessarily the answer, and, of course, the closed minded skeptical community attacked him for suggesting that something like this may be real.

For the record. I believe his story. I believe he is telling the truth as he knows it. I read this originally back when it came out, and felt that after 20 years, I should re-read it and see how I felt about it from my current perspective. My feelings haven't changed. This was an important book. It made people more comfortable about talking about their own experiences. Whitley approaches this with common sense and skepticism. He spends a lot of time trying to see if his experiences were somehow caused by hallucinations or medical issues, like temporal lobe epilepsy, which they were not. Even at this early point, though, he realizes that dealing with the UFO Phenomenon, literally challenges our view on what reality is. As I read this, I got the feeling of someone painting a painting, representing their normal life, while all the while another painting was being painted underneath, and only a crack reveals it's existence. And as that crack is widened, more of the painting underneath, this hidden world, comes into awareness. It was always there, and we have no idea how it got there without us knowing. It's disturbing. And enlightening. If you are interested in the paranormal and have never read this classic piece of work, you should. It is as valid today as when it was published. It is pure, straight to the point, and free of any kind of agenda. As Whitley takes your through his awaking into what happened to him, you can feel what an impact it had on him. As strange as it all may sound, I am sure it was 1000 times worse for him.

I do plan on reading, at very least, Transformation again as well, as I think that had even more of an impact on me than this did.

Buy on Amazon.

I had wanted to read John Keel's Jadoo: The Astounding Story of One Man's Search into the Mysteries of Black Magic in the Orient for a very long time. Out of print, and sometimes hard to find, I finally picked up a reasonably priced copy of it. Running roughly 250 pages, it is one hell of an interesting read. Keel is known, of course, most famously for The Mothman Prophecies, and overall as a UFOlogist. But this book is before all that. Published in 1957, this was his debut, and chronicles his life traveling around the Middle East in search of unusual stories. He delves into the secrets of snake charmers and mystics. He learned the rather interesting Indian Rope Trick. He searches for a Yeti in the mountains near Tibet. He does all this by the seat of his pants, with almost no money, and encounters plenty of problems. It's a very entertaining read, and through it all, despite his overall skepticism, he finds some truly unexplainable things out there. At the same time, you can really feel what he is describing, from the squalor of certain areas, to the majesty of others. It's a look at another culture that you don't often see from our world.

In short, if you like Keel's style, his frank, and humorous approach, you will like Jadoo, and I would highly recommend tracking down a copy.

Below is a home movie that he took of the snake charmers he talks about in the book... Kind of interesting that it exists, especially since he had to sell all his equipment to have money to live on shortly after this. Would love to see more footage from the events in the book.

Many years ago I picked up a couple of beat up copies of books by Immanuel Velikovsky at a used book store. I knew the name, but not much else. I figured maybe one day I would read them. Around 2012, I had become very interested in The Electric Universe theory and thunderbolts.info has become a favorite site of mine. They often mention Velikovsky, enough so that I finally sat down and read "Worlds in Collision".

The main gist of Velikovsky's theory is that Venus started life as a comet, and within historical times. It was ejected from Jupiter around 1600 B.C. when a larger mass collided with the gas giant, and it had close encounters with both Earth and Mars before settling into it's current location. Velikovsky was a Russian born psychoanalyst, and a friend and contemporary of Einstein. When this book was published in 1950 it ignited a huge controversy. First of all, he was writing outside of his field. Second, he was contradicting accepted science at the time. Third, he was using ancient texts to support his theory, especially the Bible. None of this sat well with the scientific establishment of the time. It got worse, when various predictions he made, Venus would be hot, not cold as mainstream science believed, for example, turned out to be correct. In fact, the majority of what Velikovsky predicted seems to have been accurate. The attacks on him are astonishing, and have been covered in many other books. Carl Sagan made a special point of trying to take down Velikovsky, and many feel that he was successful. However a clear, unbiased look at what Sagan did, reveals that he actually failed to disprove Immanuel's theory, and that it was more of a hit job than anything else. Back to the book. It is a fascinating read. It was a best seller when it came out, and has held it's own for a long time after. It is well written, and detailed. And, yes, he does take passages from the bible to support his theory. However, he finds equating passages from other parts of the world to substantiate this. If one text says the sun stood still in the sky, he looks for, and finds, other texts from the same time period, from other parts of the world, that say the same thing. He shows that Venus is not mentioned by any cultures prior to a certain point, approximately 1600 B.C. He shows that it flew erratically around the heavens, and was a fearsome thing in the sky. He shows that it had a comet's tail, and was often referred to as comet's were. It is a stunning piece of work. I was pretty blown away when I got done. This book, however, was published in 1950. What I wanted to know was, has anything in our current understanding of science and history been found that soundly defeats Velikovsky's work? It seemed like a massive undertaking.

Buy on Amazon.