Book Reviews Perceptions Magazine, April 2026
The Orbs of Cloverdale:
Northwest Alabama’s Mysterious and Unexplained Orb Phenomenon
By Dr. Wyatt Cox
January 1, 2026, 235 pages, Paperback, U.S. $10.99
ISBN: 9798241138767
Reviewed by Brent Raynes
Wyatt Cox, the author of UFO and Bigfoot Sightings in Alabama (2004) and Spooklights: The Amazing Cloverdale Alabama Spooklight Mystery (2007), has been, along with his long-time friend Greg Keeton, been looking into the so-called “spooklights” going back to 1977. Reading and hearing about local reports of mysterious lights and objects in the sky back then, they decided to engage in some skywatching and began setting up 35mm cameras on tripods.
They quickly hit pay dirt. They came to my attention when their written reports and photographs of anomalous lights they had taken began appearing in 1979 in Specula, a journal of the American Association of Meta-Science, edited by Thomas E. Bearden, Ph.D., a nuclear engineer and retired US Army Lt. Colonel who was deeply interested in such reports. Bearden was even a consultant to scientists and researchers working on the famous Long Valley “spooklight” in New Jersey, being investigated by a group called Vestigia. I even wrote an article myself in Specula in 1981 about Tennessee’s reports of a “ghost light” in Chapel Hill in 1981 and in 1983 I also wrote an article for my hometown newspaper the weekly Wayne County News (Waynesboro, TN) about Wyatt and Greg’s “spooklight” investigations where, at that time, that had taken an estimated 150 photographs of anomalous lights. I even described a local site here in Wayne County where similar mystery lights had been reported. One woman even claiming she stepped outside of her home one night and observed a reddish-orange ball of light about ten feet in diameter resting on the ground nearby. Then suddenly it vanished without a trace before her astonished eyes. I’d say this site is roughly 20 miles north of the Cloverdale area.
Wyatt’s “Earthlight Journey,” as he calls it, has been a determined forty-nine year effort thus far to observe and document these phenomena in the field, research the many other similar sites located throughout the world, and strive to figure out what evidence and theories may best provide an appropriate explanation for these ongoing reports. Wyatt takes the reader from the beginning in 1977 up to 2025 describing the numerous sightings and sharing many photographic captures, including newspaper articles from the area. He explores potential geological and atmospheric factors, and how plasma energy is often cited by a good number of researchers in this field as the potential source of these anomalous lights.
In recent years, Wyatt has managed to draw increasing attention to this region’s phenomena, even welcoming earthlight/UAP hunters from Chicago and Ontario, Canada, to come and visit Cloverdale, and most recently a Florida physicist named Rex Groves, who came highly recommended by Italian astrophysicist Dr. Massimo Teaodorani, who has been involved in investigating the Hessdalen “earthlights” of Norway.
A lot of videos and photographs continue to be captured of unusual lights in the Cloverdale area. Volunteers have come to frequently gather there and capture this evidence, calling themselves CERT, the Cloverdale Earthlight Research Team. The effort is to try and separate the proverbial wheat from the chaff, as the expression goes, the genuine anomaly from observations that possess non-anomalous explanations, like observations that correspond to so-called “satellite flare,” where sometimes after the sun sets solar panels and antennas on some satellites over the western horizon may brighten up briefly, reflecting sunlight.
It can be a really peculiar sight. But such would only account for some observations. Certainly not all of them.
Inside UFOs:
True Accounts of Contact with Extraterrestrials
By Preston Dennett
Blue Giant Books
2017, 177 pages, paperback, U.S. $14.95
ISBN: 153970002X
Reviewed by Brent Raynes
This book reviews ten case histories from experiencers claiming personal encounters with a variety of alleged UFO beings from the rather atypical Greys, Nordics, the Praying Mantes-types (imagine 9 and even 15-foot-tall ones described in two of these cases), to even an 8-foot-tall orange-haired humanoid. No little green men from Mars taking center stage in these high strange narratives. The accounts carry some potentially mind-boggling implications wherein the laws of physics, of time and space, don’t seem to apply in this alternate reality as they do here in ours. In the first case, the story begins in 1982 when two Navy buddies on a ship in the Pacific are in conversation and one of them reveals since age 10, he’s had ongoing alien contact, even visited other planets. Upon hearing this the friend is not surprisingly skeptical. But then two days later, the buddy claiming alien contact approaches his skeptical friend and reveals that he just visited his home in San Diego, which was thousands of miles away. Claimed his alien friends took him. The skeptic is startled when his buddy tells him about the house, about furniture, a carpet, a 66 Galaxy 500 automobile, his bedroom – things that existed the way they were described some 10-15 years ago! Impressed by this, the friend from San Diego declared, “Okay, then, I want to meet your little green friends.” Then about three days later, it happened, and again time travel seemed involved as at one point the craft he was in flew over a home he had lived in as a child, and he observed himself emerging from his home, possibly around age 12, and going across the street and talking to his grandmother on the porch of her home.
There was a lot more detailed information on this case but I’m writing a review of course and not a book. But without question the stories in this volume are quite thought-provoking and may provide some potential clues and insights into these high strange testimonies.
Earlier in his life the author of this book was himself a “vehement UFO Skeptic” and felt that anyone who said that they had seen a UFO had to be “uneducated, naïve, a liar, or mentally ill or on drugs.” He had even dismissed his own brother’s story of seeing a UFO. But then a few years later, there was a story in the news about a pilot seeing a UFO. Still skeptical, he did decide to question his brother about what he’d seen earlier, and this time really listened and was surprised to hear how it was a disc-shaped craft, with a dome on top, many lights, and at treetop level, confirmed by two of his friends who were with him at the time – more than just a fuzzy light in the sky that could be Venus or something simple like that. And so, cautiously, he began asking around, reading books and magazines on the subject, and discovered that there were a lot of strange and similar descriptions, even from people he found as he questioned friends and co-workers. He even began skywatching and visiting reported UFO hotspots, and near midnight on July 19, 1992, as he was alone driving down the road in his car, a small white-yellow glowing ball of light, under obvious intelligent control, appeared hovering in front of his windshield, only about a foot outside of the glass. He soon began having other anomalous experiences, and in 2022 he claimed he had a fully conscious memory of even being onboard a UFO craft, in the company of other humans, plus some Grays and a tall white being. “It took me many years to realize that I myself was a contactee,” he claimed. For more information on Dennett’s reluctant entry into ufology, readers might like to check out his article in the February 2025 edition of this magazine: https://www.apmagazine.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2335&Itemid=53
