Book Reviews Perceptions Magazine, June 2020
UFO Encounters:
How High Strange Events Transform Human Perception
By Angelia Sheer
Parasheer Research, LLC
2020, 260 pages, Paperback, U.S. $17.99
ISBN: 9798617828186
Reviewed by Brent Raynes
Angelia Sheer has been researching and investigating the UFO enigma for nearly four decades. She is the founder of her own private research group Parasheer Research and she is Tennessee’s State Director/Chief Field Investigator and STAR Team Lead for MUFON [Mutual UFO Network]. Named MUFON’s 2019 Field Investigator of the Year, Angelia is a “boots on the ground” gal and says she’s interviewed over 2500 UFO witnesses through the years.
Thus this book is not a rehash of previously published accounts, as many books are, but instead is some of Angelia’s most extraordinary and evidential case histories. That’s a big plus for me as I don’t want to read the same old stories and theories others have already covered in hundreds of other books [ad nauseam]. It’s very refreshing to dive into a book where the author has personally been involved firsthand with the data gathering process and is an experienced field investigator and researcher. Plus, in addition to all of that, Angelia is unafraid to delve deeply into the controversial and bewildering high-strangeness components of the paranormal, consciousness and physics that crop up in many of these cases and that need to be properly examined without bias, prejudice, and preconception.
Angelia admits that like most everyone else in the UFO field, she began with a strictly “nuts and bolts” orientation. However, soon troubling “anomalies” began to crop up in a high percentage of her data in spite of her best efforts to keep her research “pure.” She recounts one single case that forever changed the way she viewed and investigated the UFO phenomenon. It was a case involving 14 people one night on a beach stargazing. Suddenly, four of the people observed a rather amazing UFO display while the other ten people, with the four witnesses pointing the UFO out to them, were unable to see anything unusual! The late great Swiss psychologist Dr. Carl G. Jung, who authored a book on UFOs in 1958 entitled Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen In the Sky, struggled himself to understand such an anomaly. He wrote: “I was once at a spiritualistic séance where four of the five people present saw an object like a moon floating above the abdomen of the medium. They showed me, the fifth person present, exactly where it was, and it was absolutely incomprehensible to them that I could see nothing of the sort.” Jung proposed that UFO, psychic, and religious apparitional and visionary phenomena possibly existed on the borders of what we perceive as mental and physical. He used the term “psychoid” to describe it. While too many ufologists have wasted too many years editing out assorted anomalies reported by their witnesses, feeling reports of such things as paranormal incidents and cryptid sightings belonged in a separate category and field outside of their own, it is to Angelia’s credit that she adopted a much more comprehensive, objective, and wide reaching approach to this subject. This book contains a great deal of well-presented, thought-provoking case studies – even one that’s just a few miles down the road from me!
I certainly highly recommend UFO Encounters!
Earth Magic: Your Complete Guide to Natural Spells, Potions, Plants, Herbs, Witchcraft, and More
By Marie D. Jones
Visible Ink Press
272 pages, 120 Color Photos and Illustrations
6” x 9” Trade Paperback, U.S. $19.95
ISBN: 978-1-57859-697-3
Earth Magic is a comprehensive book that explores a wide range of earth-based beliefs and traditions, delving into herbs and plants, symbols, talismans, candles, gems, crystals, stones, chakras, describing the powers and meanings that have been associated with all of this and more, explaining how to work with the various energies and forces of our bodies, our planet and the cosmos, in ways to enrich and empower our lives and that of others. Knowledge and practices are brought to light from a wide variety of sources, be it shamanism, wicca, herbalism, divination, Jungian archetypes, etc., etc. This book also has a useful glossary, a bibliography and extensive index.
Marie is also known for writing many other well liked nonfiction books for those exploring alternative subject matter, like the paranormal, conspiracies, ancient knowledge, and cutting-edge science. A regular contributor to such noted publications as Fate, New Dawn, and Paranoia Magazine, Marie is in much demand, having been interviewed on over a thousand radio stations, and has made appearances on the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens.
