Chris Aubeck

this is an interesting book co-authored by my favourite author on the topic (in fact, really the only one i still read on the subject).

jacques vallee's most important contribution to the field of 'ufology' was to change the debate from "are ufos real", as in, "are aliens and their spaceships visiting earth" to "there is a well-documented physical and emotional phenomena, with consistent characteristics that has been going on for much of recorded human history. what is it?"

he frustrates many of those inclined to believe the extra-terrestrial hypothesis (eth) but he's a scientist, and what anyone else thinks is not really his concern.

i quibble with the format of this book, and it is not necessarily required reading, but it has a place in your library along his 'trilogy' of dimensions, confrontations and revelations.

in the end, this book is really just one more in his 'call to arms' to scientists and researchers to ignore the noise of the eth adherents and start to treat this phenomenon as something worthy of serious study. sadly, almost 50 years into his work, it doesn't seem like we are any closer to this happening.… (mais)

This book is a compilation of historical testimony reporting strange aerial phenomena. Rather than speculate on the nature and origin of UFO's, Valee (the real life model of the French scientist by Francois Truffaut in Steven Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind") and Aubeck simply compile summaries and citations from historical writings spanning a thousand years. In the eleventh century, for example, Raymond de'Aguiiers, the Count of Toulouse wrote: "...we beheld a marvelous sign in the sky...there stood over the city a very large star, which, after a short time, divided into three parts and fell in the camp of Turks" (96). In a Seventeenth Century, we read a quote from a period document about a "Great Star which...gave so great a light, that some inhabitants here..could see to do business in the house by the light of it; one credible person here beheld it two hours together, and at last saw it turn into the perfect form of a Roman S, and then presently it divided in the middle, and one half went to the north-east, and the other to the south-eat, and so by degrees disappeared" (210). The book is a grab bag of anecdotes as told throughout time about strange things in the sky. Whether you believe UFO's are extraterrestrial in origin or not, this is a great compendium of aerial anomalies, free of wacky interpretations and such. In the book, the authors include several accounts of strange people or beings associated with the aerial phenomena described. If you're going to do research on UFO's, you're going to need historical research, a historical archive. This book is the best, the most exhaustive and most unbiased contribution to this kind of archive. But be forewarned... there's not much of a narrative, just a series of vignettes pulled from historical sources.… (mais)