Book Reviews Perceptions Magazine, May 2019
Field Guide to the Spirit World:
The Science of Angel Power, Discarnate Entities, and Demonic Possession
By Susan B. Martinez, Ph.D.
Foreword by Whitley Strieber
Bear & Company
One Park Street
Rochester, Vermont 05767
2019, 304 pages, 6 x 9, US $20.00
20 b&w illustrations
ISBN: 978-1-59143-332-3
Reviewed by Brent Raynes
The author of this book, Susan B. Martinez, Ph.D., is a linguist, teacher, and a paranormal researcher. She has a doctorate in anthropology from Columbia University, and she is also the author of The Mysterious Origins of Hybrid Man, Delusions in Science and Spirituality, Time of the Quickening, and The Lost History of the Little People.
This latest book, Field Guide to the Spirit World, is a comprehensive volume that delves deeply into the dark spirit shadowlands that most paranormal authors would prefer to tread lightly over, if at all. She challenges the mainstream view of neuroscience that all reported instances of “voices,” apparitions, and psychic manifestations are only psychological in nature and origin. She assembles a vast collection of data to make her case and makes distinctions between those phenomena that are spiritual and psychic gifts and those that are of a negative character, including demonic possession.
Martinez points out that fundamental to it all, we are spirit beings housed within a physical body, a fact overlooked by the mainstream sciences, and that wandering spirits on the earth plane, commonly called djinn, dybbuk, the undead, and other names, often come to inhabit and haunt people, just as houses may become haunted. She explains the many misdiagnosed psychological disturbances and symptoms that really represent “overshadowing” influences of spirits. In a chapter entitled “Freeing the Ghost,” Martinez describes methods that have been used to remove such intrusions and to send such spirits on their way.
Elsewhere in this issue of Alternate Perceptions, you can listen to an audio interview between Martinez and this reviewer.
The Energies of Crop Circles:
The Science and Power of a Mysterious Intelligence
By Lucy Pringle with James Lyons
Bear & Company
One Park Street
Rochester, Vermont 05767
2019, 432 pages, 6.63 x 9.5, US $24.00
ISBN: 978-1-62055-867-6
Full-color throughout
Reviewed by Brent Raynes
Back in July 1990, while studying a crop circle site near Winchester, England, Lucy Pringle experienced a remarkable healing of a severe shoulder injury that she had been suffering with. In addition, a friend who had accompanied her to this site experienced immediate and dramatic relief from her Raynaud’s syndrome as well. After that Pringle decided to investigate and document any other instances of physical and psychological effects that seemed to be associated with inexplicable electromagnetic energies that existed at these formations.
Fellow crop circle researcher James Lyons, an aerospace engineer, came to be of tremendous assistance in Pringle’s work. Together they have extensively visited and photographed numerous sites, working with other researchers, experiencers, a medical research team and scientists from all over the world. They’re exploring the links of electromagnetic fields on living systems, consciousness and the power of intention. The majority of healing effects are unfortunately temporary, which seems especially noticeable with arthritis and rheumatism sufferers. Many experiencer testimonials are provided and the evidence seems quite compelling that many people have personally been quite affected by these mysterious “energies.” In addition though, many crop circle visitors report experiencing negative ill effects too. In fact, the majority do, and these often include such effects as dizziness, weak knees, leg pain, nausea, diarrhea, sudden hunger, and a variety of other symptoms. The authors recommend that should you find yourself feeling ill or uncomfortable in any way, then leave the site.
This book also describes the investigative scientific work that the researchers have conducted in their attempts to better understand the “energies” of the crop circle phenomenon. They’ve even done EEGs, using what is called a Mind Mirror system, detecting brainwave changes of persons before entering a circle, inside the circle, and after leaving the circle.
Hopefully, over time, thanks to the important and pioneering work of such researchers, we’ll have a much more complete understanding of the puzzling phenomena at these sites – an understanding that will hopefully generate medical and scientific benefits for humankind. For example, the possible correlation of increased gamma frequency levels detected on the EEG of people at crop circle sites that could be responsible for how Parkinson’s sufferers at these locations have reported a decrease and even a temporary discontinuance of their shaking symptoms.