Book Reviews Perceptions Magazine, March 2026
The Innerspace of Outerspace:
Exploring Other Worlds Through Music
by Mike Fiorito
Apprentice House Press
Loyola University Maryland
4501 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21210
http://www.AppenticeHouse.com
2026, 218 pages, U.S. $20.99
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-62720-683-9
Reviewed by Brent Raynes
Musicians and UFOs have been a recurrent theme in UFO circles for a good number of years now, though many will choose to ignore it. Mike Fiorito’s The Innerspace of Outerspace (such an awesome title) takes a deep dive into the potential music connection with alternative states of consciousness and alternate realities, from modern music to ancient shamanic chants, drumbeats, flutes, the Australian digeridoo, and one of my favorites the Peruvian Whistling Vessels. In the Foreword by Barbara Fisher of the 6 Degrees of John Keel podcast, she hits us with: “Music is fundamental to human life. It was with us in the beginning, it is with us now, and it will be with us far into the future.” She shares with us how one of the oldest musical instruments out there is a Neanderthal bone flute from Slovenia (somewhere between 42,000 to 60,000 years old) and how it was based on an ancient musical scale that we know today as the pentatonic scale, based on a five-note octave. She points out how musician, composer, conductor, and songwriter Bobby McFerrin showed in a public demonstration entitled “Notes and Neurons” back in 2009 for the World Science Festival how a group of people can learn to sing music together in a mere three minutes. These were not professional musicians. The implication is that our brains are wired for this.
The demonstration can be found on YouTube and Barbara strongly encourages us to watch it. After watching this for just a few minutes I can certainly see why.
Barbara shares how at an early age she found how farm animals responded to her singing, humming, and chanting. “A particularly violent, half-feral cat would climb into my lap and fall asleep purring when I sang long, low-voiced Latin chants I learned in choir,” she wrote. Then in the early 1990s, while attending college in Athens, Ohio, she and some of her friends began seeing unusual balls of light at night. One night as she and a friend were watching the lights she began singing to them, and one orange orb about the size of a small grapefruit came within about five feet from them, hovering at eye-level, when the orb was suddenly replaced briefly with the mysterious figure of a tiny little naked woman with flowing hair and moth-like wings.
Grammy-nominated rock musician Merrell Franhauser, who wrote the iconic surfer song “Wipe Out!” shared in an interview with me about how he’d had two of his own separate UFO sightings while living in Hawaii. One, with others, happened atop Haleakala Crater in Maui, one evening in 1973, which inspired his song “Calling from a Star,” which was included in a UK album release called “Eklectia,” in which 17 artists and groups in total shared how they felt their music was influenced by alien and/or UFO encounters. Merrell’s other encounter was in the daytime on Hana Highway where he described seeing two silver saucers in the sky, which inspired yet another song, “On Our Way To Hana.”
A good number of musicians claim to have been inspired by their anomalous UFOish encounters. In this book ufologist and musician Earl Gray Anderson shares what Chris Squire, a British musician with a rock band known as Yes, told him how he was touring in the UK back in 1977 when he asked the driver to pull over so that he could heed the call of nature. As he was watering a rock, he suddenly felt like he was being watched. “I looked up, and not thirty feet away from me was a hovering UFO,” he told Anderson. “It was a metallic flying saucer with a dome on top, right out of a movie!” He later wrote and played a song entitled “Aliens (Are Only Us from the Future).”
The Innerspace of Outerspace explores a vast landscape that seldom receives the attention it deserves as many fear it will derail them from the left-brain boundary lines that our modern ways of living often feel safest for us. Too many distractions connected with the right-brain many consider worrisome, too subjective. This is not taking into account how many contactee experiencers, NDErs, and others of mystical, paranormal persuasion often do report psychological and spiritual transformative changes in their lives. Besides “nuts and bolts” there may indeed be something along the lines of “notes and neurons” to take into account, which may be better observed and documented by scientists than the other. It’s the poets, the artists, musicians, mystics, dreamers, religious visionaries and the contactee experiences who may hover closest to the potential insights and inner psychic dynamics of the unconscious that may yet reveal the most relevant clues of all.
Many over the years have sought to better understand and define the interface of these inner and outer realms and this book touches upon so many of these people, like Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, Rudolph Steiner, Terence McKenna, Jacques Vallee, and too many others to list here. Being someone who wrote a book on John Keel, I appreciated Renee Reeser Zelnick’s statement of how Keel had “argued that the entities behind UFOs might not be travelers from space, but intelligences from a parallel or hidden layer of reality. Tricksters, Spirits, Shapeshifters. Beings that have worn many masks over the centuries: djinn, fairies, cryptids, Men in Black. Keel believed these ultraterrestrials could manipulate perception itself – not just appear in the sky but enter the mind. They didn’t just land in saucers. They whispered through myth, ritual, and symbol.”
I appreciate how Mike Fiorito delved into all of this and expressed his many thoughts on these thorny issues. “The Innerspace of Outerspace is a journey through that liminal realm – where music becomes both mirror and map, reflecting unseen dimensions and guiding us toward them. From the celestial jazz of Sun Ra to the opalescent dreamscapes of Brian Eno, music invites us to explore domains beyond the physical world.”
“Though I engage deeply with academic sources, this is not intended to be a conventional scholarly work, but rather, an invitation to the reader into a shared space of imagination and inquiry. To explore. To question. Above all, to listen – especially to the music.”
Monsters: Myths, Legends, and Real Encounters
by Richard Estep
Foreword by Dr. Karen Stollznow, Co-host of the Monster Talk podcast
Visible Ink Press
43311 Joy Road #414
Canton, Michigan 48187-2075
March 10, 2026, 304 pages, Paperback U.S. $22.95
ISBN: 978-1-57859-877-9
Reviewed by Brent Raynes
A prolific author Richard Estep is a regular columnist for Haunted Magazine and often appears on such TV shows as Haunted Files, Haunted Hospitals, Paranormal 911, and Paranormal Night Shift. He's also written some dark nonfiction books like Serial Killers: The Minds, Methods, and Mayhem of History's Most Notorious Murderers; The Serial Killer Next Door: The Double Lives of Notorious Murders; Grifters, Frauds, and Crooks: True Stories of American Corruption.
In this latest volume, Monsters: Myths, Legends, and Real Encounters, Estep covers lots of truly creepy and unexplained accounts of chilling encounters with such besties as Scotland's legendary Loch Ness Monster, as well as Morgawr, the "sea giant" that's been reported being seen off the southern coast of England going back to around 600 B.C.E. Then too there's the historical legends of werewolves going back to the ancient Mesopotamian text The Epic of Gilgamesh to modern accounts of Cannock Chase, in Staffordshire, England, where creatures of the werewolf description have been reported, as well as the so-called Black-Eyed Children. In one case, a mother and her daughter were walking in a wooded area near a golf course when the daughter was grabbed and taken away by what fit the classic description of a werewolf. The girl was taken into undergrowth but fortunately a male golfer came to her rescue, admitting werewolf is exactly how it looked to him. Modern fiction and Hollywood have portrayed the werewolf often as like that done by actor Lou Chaney Jr. in Hollywood's 1941 motion picture classic The Wolf Man.
Some chilling tales of unnatural beasts lose their luster over time as happened in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, when a local legend of something called the Hodag dated back to the late 1800's, tales spun by area lumberjacks who told it was like a dangerous ox that had died and become like a zombie. A trapper named Eugene Shepard took advantage of the tales and claimed he'd been able to capture one. People paid to see it, though it turned out to be carved from wood and covered in an animal pelt. Today Rhinelander's Chamber of Commerce has a Hodag statue in front of its office and the Hodag has even appeared in the tales of Harry Potter and Scooby Doo.
However, returning to those accounts that have yet to be fully explained, or captured, Estep includes such provocative legends as the Bigfoot, or Australia's cousin to the Bigfoot named Yowie, the goat sucking Chupacabra, the winged Jersey Devil of New Jersey and Pennsylvania (though reportedly there was an exposed sideshow of such believed to have been like a kangaroo instead), as well as West Virginia's winged red-eyed beastie Mothman, as well as that state's Flatwoods Monster, and a deep dive into the tales and lore of blood-thirsty vampires, like the Wakwak and the Manananggal, two huge bat-winged creatures, both female, both vampires reported in the Philippines, reportedly seen by a number of witnesses as recently as 2023 (which reminds me of the case documented by Indiana's Fortean researcher Don Worley who interviewed a former soldier who described seeing a woman with wings in Vietnam), the evil hairy, horned Krampus who punishes naughty children around Christmas time, and the living dead zombies of folklore and those who suspect that something called Tetrodotoxin from a puffer fish could be used to cause someone to exhibit zombie type behavior.
Monsters will introduce you the reader to many bizarre stories across the planet. Ultimately, each of us is given here a thought-provoking overview of high strange tales of supernatural or some sort of unnatural creatures that certainly don't conform to what our academic sciences and institutions certify to be a normal part of our established reality, what the late Charles Fort described as things "damned" by the academic establishment.
It all makes for some interesting reading and for some it may be a springboard that launches them into further research of such accounts. It may even spark the interest of yet another future cryptozoologist!
