New Book Reviews
By Brent Raynes
UFOs in Missouri:
True Tales of Extraterrestrial and Related Phenomena
By: Lee Prosser
Schiffer Publishing Ltd.
4880 Lower Valley Road
Arglen, PA 19310
www.schifferbooks.com
2011, 160 pages, US $16.99
ISBN: 978-0-7643-3747-5
Reviewed by: Brent Raynes
The author of this book, Lee Prosser, a lifelong Vedanist, a psychic sensitive and a paranormal investigator, lives in the Missouri Ozarks. He’s written a pretty large number of books, many on the paranormal, his writing career going back to 1963. In this book, he documents a large number of UFO cases, many of what we call high strangeness events (i.e., contacts, abductions, paranormal elements, etc.) and his speculations and theoretical landscape include the inter-dimensional, alternate universes, tulpas (thoughtforms), time slips, time travel, vortices, and even how to make contact with the visitors. He shares simple techniques that have worked for him and includes details of some of his own personal encounters with what he believes were such beings!
He shares stories of fascinating close encounters that you’ve never read or heard about before. Some you may find truly challenging, like that of Margie Kay Padgitt, a solid business woman and Assistant MUFON Director and MUFON Star Team Investigator for Missouri, Margie has been psychic since childhood, claims that she sees several spirits a week, along with an occasional alien too! She believes that the two different beings traverse our reality from the same dimensional realm, which might explain why sometimes they both look transparent.
The Show Me state certainly has many intriguing UFO tales and Prosser invites you the reader to personally come and visit Missouri and check out some of the hot spots that he has uncovered.
Out of Place in Time and Space:
Inventions, Beliefs, and Artistic Anomalies That Were Impossibly Ahead of their Time
By: Lamont Wood
New Page, a division of Career Press
220 West Parkway, Unit 12
Pompton Plains, NJ 07444
2011, 224 pages, US $15.99
ISBN: 978-1-60163-178-7
Reviewed by: Brent Raynes
This book is devoted to objects, beliefs, or practices that seem to be very much out of place for the time and place in which they were found and recorded. For example, how about the corroded Antikythera Mechanism recovered by sponge divers back in 1901? It was found in a Roman shipwreck, just off the Mediterranean island of Antikythera, and it is a sophisticated type of Roman-era computer constructed no later than 65 BC! Or how about the accounts of huge war machines and death rays that panicked Roman attackers at Syracuse in 214 BC?
Then there is the Voynich Manuscript, named after a man who, after escaping a prison camp in Siberia, acquired this manuscript back in 1912. While it was been determined to have been a detailed hand-produced work from back around 1420 AD, no one has been able to translate it as it is composed of an elaborate alphabet completely unknown to anyone today. It also contains numerous illustrations that make no sense whatsoever, like plants and astronomical images that match nothing known to us! Truly this is an artifact that seems completely out-of-place within any known time and space point of reference!
Then there is Chief Plenty Coups of the Crow Indian Nation whose boyhood vision presumably foretold how the white man would remove the Indian tribes from their land and that their cattle would replace the buffalo.
Read also how science fiction can eerily foretell the future as well, and how ancient religious artwork contained images of what resemble classic flying saucers – or in the case of one painting from centuries ago, a child can be seen holding what resembles a toy helicopter!
The author presents some pretty fascinating, mind-boggling data, but does so in a matter-of-fact fashion and doesn’t stray from facts and sound speculations. While he can’t dismiss time travel completely as the cause for such anomalous artifacts in some cases, he gives us his best attempts to offer logical and reasonable explanations, when those facts are available.
