Book Reviews Perceptions Magazine, October 2024
Karahan Tepe:
Civilization of the Anunnaki and the Cosmic
Origins of the Serpent of Eden
By Andrew Collins
Foreword by Hugh Newman
Bear & Company
One Park Street
Rochester, Vermont 05767
www.BearandCompanyBooks.com
2024, 440 pages, Paperback, U.S. $26.00
ISBN: 978-1-59143-478-8
Reviewed by Brent Raynes
England’s Andrew Collins is a dedicated and indefatigable science and history author who is absolutely tops in these fields. He’s traveled to numerous locations worldwide. A massive cave complex beneath Egypt’s Giza plateau called “Collins’ Cave” is named after him. He’s authored such acclaimed books as Gobekli Tepe: Genesis of the Gods, The Cygnus Key, Gods of Eden, From the Ashes of Angels, and many other noteworthy titles. I’ve had the distinct honor and pleasure of meeting him personally thanks to Dr. Gregory Little, a long-time contributing editor and columnist of this magazine, who co-authored with Andrew the splendid volumes Origins of the Gods and Denisovan Origins.
And now Andrew presents the literary world with Karahan Tepe: Civilization of the Anunnaki and the Cosmic Origins of the Serpent of Eden, another extraordinary blockbuster volume that thoroughly covers this sister site to Gobekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey, dated at more than 11,000 years and regarded as one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the 21st century. Detailing his exhaustive research and onsite investigations, with numerous color photographs of this incredible former post-Ice Age civilization, consisting of approximately ten acres of human and animal statues, snake carvings, T-shaped pillars, and interconnected underground enclosures with stone columns that were carved from the bedrock.
Andrew further reviews the site’s astronomical alignments, explains how the site was a shamanic oracle center, how a belief in the Milky Way as a kind of cosmic serpent would down through history become identified with the biblical serpent of Eden, the Vedic Tradition’s kundalini concept, the black snake of the Yezidis, and how it influenced the foundation of the Gnostic Ophite mysteries. Andrew presents a wealth of information, connecting numerous historical dots and shedding much needed illumination on our ancient world. The book is loaded with lots of photos and illustrations, along with an appendix, notes, a bibliography, and an index.
I highly recommended this book!
The Man Who Wanted to Make Contact
Volume One: Beginnings
By Rob Freeman
With Mark McNabb
Foreword by Grant Cameron
ItsallConnected Publishing
https://www.linkedin.com/in/skylightfilms
2004, 177 pages, Paperback. U.S. $16.99
ISBN: 9798323210398
Reviewed by Brent Raynes
Holding this book in hand brought back memories of my very first meeting with Rob Freeman. It was a cold Friday night on November 16, 2018. There he was in a field off of 272 in Cloverdale, Alabama, his tripod with numerous cameras on it set up, including thermal, infrared, and full spectrum. He called it his WMD, which stood for Weapon of Mass Detection. Rob also had a Tri field Meter with ground leads to detect electrical or magnetic anomalies and a marine radar. He was far from his home in Ontario, Canada, but as I found out then, and as a reader of his book The Man Who Wanted to Make Contact will find out, leaving home in search of UFOs is something he’s at home with doing.
I parked and joined him. At times we had to walk around the property as we conversed in order to try and stay warm. There’s a saying that home is where the heart is and for Rob I soon learned how his quest had taken him not only across the U.S. and Canada but all over the United Kingdom, to Australia, Norway, Easter Island, Chile, Brazil, and the hottest spot he’d found for UFO hunting, Peru, which didn’t much surprise me as I had covered a lot of stories from that corner of the world in my own book Visitors from Hidden Realms (2004).
Rob had begun his quest nearly four years earlier. Already he had captured some interesting anomalies on film, though during our first meeting he confided to me about a sighting he’d had that he regarded as the “most amazing thing I’d ever seen.”
“In Australia, over a healing center in the mountains, I saw a beautiful bright green orb come down,” he recalled. “It materialized at about 30 feet up, came down, about 3 or 4 seconds to just above the center before it kind of blinked out. It was bright emerald green and the inside was like gold sparkles.” “When we went there, we just had a strong sense that we were going to see something that night, and I didn’t even take the equipment,” Rob said. “I left it back in Brisbane where we were staying. I said, ‘We’re going to make contact tonight. There’s something that’s going to happen. I can feel it strongly and then, that’s when I saw this teardrop shaped orb about 3 foot wide, and it just let up everything. It was amazing.”
From his description of the healing center it sounded to me like a meditational, New Age healing arts type place. However, two men who ran it claimed to have been seeing for some time strange things in the skies nearby. The center was called Shanti Bhavan, located in the rainforests of Northern South Wales, and again Rob’s description of his sighting can be found on page 113 of the book.
Rob’s first encounter with a UFO happened on the night of March 29, 1966, at age 12. The object was over the St. Clair River between Port Huron, Michigan and Sarnia, Ontario. Rob claimed he saw “things” – possibly figures moving around behind a rotating transparent lens looking area on the object. The next day the local Sarnia Observer newspaper reported how police and hundreds of others saw the object, and how two fighter jets took off in pursuit from an air force base near Port Huron. Reportedly, the UFO left them in the proverbial dust. On another night soon after, a friend of Rob’s named John told him he wanted to see a UFO too, so they climbed up on Rob’s parent’s roof and with blankets, pillows, binoculars, camera, a compass, and walkie talkies they began a skywatch. However, after about 30 minutes in the cold Rob was ready to call it quits when, he recalls, “a whole fleet of lights, that felt like hundreds, streaked across the sky in less than 2 seconds…they seemed to be just like the stars themselves.”
Two more volumes are yet to follow this one. Rob’s co-author Mark McNabb of Skylight Films encouraged Rob to make this global journey, feeling that his 1966 experience was a kind of calling for him to do so. It was an easy sell for Rob. Rob with Mark returned again to Cloverdale, and I got to meet the both of them that time and was honored and impressed to hear firsthand their intriguing accounts from near and far. They strived to be cautious and objective, but at the same time open to the high strange, and that openness opened the doors for very strange experiences at many international locations.
