New Book Reviews
By Brent Raynes
Traveling The Path Back To The Road In The Sky:
A Strange Sage of Saucers, Space Brothers & Secret Agents
By George Hunt Williamson, aka Brother Philip
With Additional Material by Timothy Green Beckley,
Nick Redfern, and Brad Steiger
Global Communications
P.O. Box 753
New Brunswick, NJ 08903
www.ConspiracyJournal.com
www.ConspiracyJournal.com
2012, 293 pages,
ISBN 13: 9781606111338
Back from about 1952 and up into the early 1960’s, George Hunt Williamson (aka Brother Philip, Michael d’Obrenovic, Ric Williamson, and Michel D.M. d’Obrenovic or Dr. Michel R. D’ Obrenvic) burst onto the “flying saucer” scene in a major way. A friend of George Adamski (he was one of several witnesses with him during his famous November 20, 1952 encounter near Desert Center, California), as well as friends with George Van Tassel, William Dudley Pelley, Truman Bethurum, and other legends of the early UFO/contactee movement, his stories and beliefs fanned fires of high excitement and controversy for readers all over the country. Not only was he one of the early “contactee” figures of this unique time period, but he also became something of an Indiana Jones who explored ancient tombs and temples throughout Central and South America. And, as you’ll read from Nick Redfern’s thought-provoking addition, he was also of interest to the FBI who suspected him and others in this movement of being potentially subversive threats with Communist links.
Redfern wrote: “Richard Duke – a now very elderly figure who, in the period in question, worked in US Intelligence – says that as far back as 1948, the FBI began to receive reports and stories very similar to those of Williamson – that human-like aliens were among us, that they were communists, and that their means and modus-operandi of contact seemed to utilize the occult, such as Ouija Boards, as well as advanced science.”
“Duke further states that certain elements within the FBI came to a startling, albeit tentative, conclusion: that the claimed encounters with Communist extraterrestrials had nothing to do with visitors from other worlds but were instead the outcome of Soviet mind control and ‘brain-to-brain contact’ projects, in which U.S. citizens were being ‘implanted with thoughts’ by Russian ‘mind-soldiers’ that led the Contactees to think they were having real-life experiences with aliens who wanted to tell us how wonderful communism was.”
The FBI was also trying to determine if Williamson was illegally smuggling ancient artifacts into the U.S. Included are two formerly secret FBI documents (with some portions still blacked out) showing how the FBI was keeping a close eye on Williamson.
In George Hunt Williams’s original UFO writings here from his 1959 book Road in the Sky, you will read some of the earliest references to the Nazca Lines, magnetic anomalies, mysterious radio transmissions, psychic manifestations in conjunction with UFO experiences, geological fault lines and UFOs, the Hopi Indians and the Kachinas, along with other Native stories of the “Little People,” “one-eyed giants,” and the “Star People,” all terribly reminiscent of modern stories of our so-called “ufonaut” encounters. You’ll find some of the original groundwork laid for the future “ancient astronaut” theorists, with particular emphasis on Hopi, Peruvian and Egyptian belief systems and ancient sites and ruins, as well as revelations from the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Alien Mysteries, Conspiracies and Cover-Ups
By Kevin D. Randle
Visible Ink Press
43311 Joy Road, #414
Canton, MI 48187-2075
2013, 340 pages, $19.95 US; $21.95 CAN
ISBN: 978-157859418-4
www.visibleinkpress.com
A retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, Kevin Randle is a highly respected and credible author who always tries to set the record straight and zero in on the bare bone facts of the matter. In Alien Mysteries, Conspiracies and Cover-Ups, Randle tackles some of ufology’s most exciting, thought-provoking, and controversial cases. From “ancient aliens” to modern ufology, Randle delves headlong into all of it, carefully piecing together a comprehensive global and historical perspective on this - mankind’s most challenging and enduring enigma. He takes us through all of the classic accounts, from Ezekiel to the great airship wave of 1897, to Kenneth Arnold and Roswell, the early contactees of the 1950s to the modern alien abduction cases, as well as classics like the Phoenix Lights, Gulf Breeze, the Thomas Mantell air crash, the Lonnie Zamora incident, the UFO encounter and F-94 Air Force jet crash in Walesville, New York in 1954, the Florida scoutmaster in 1952 who claimed to have been burned during a close encounter, and even the Eugene Metcalf jet “plane-napping” which he allegedly witnessed in 1955 (he was one of the first eyewitnesses I wrote to in my early teenaged years in the field). Randle goes over the Air Force involvement in UFO investigations, the Condon Committee, and on the subject of conspiracies concludes that for whatever reasons, indeed government agencies have hidden UFO evidence and denied its reality, and yet by the same token, he adds, ufologists have done the same in promoting and exposing their own “particular point of view.” Most conspiracies, Randle points out, involve only a few people and are benign. “Some are by people who shouldn’t be trusted at all and who are working only in their own self-interest,” he wrote. “But there are some conspiracies that have much more nefarious purposes and are much more wide-ranging. These need to be exposed for the benefit of all.”
This is a thorough book that covers a lot of ufological ground and is especially recommended for beginners in the UFO field.
