Nine Reasons to Fear the Paranormal
A Commentary by Michael
Grosso
One experience more than any other helped me understand why some people might be
repelled and afraid of the paranormal. If they are, I can't really blame them. I can think of more than one good reason to be afraid of the stuff. There is plenty to fear, plenty about the paranormal to induce feelings of uneasiness...
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Project Blue Book's Last Years
by Colonel Hector J. Quintanilla (ret.)
"In April 1963 I was informed of a new assignment at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base..." So begins this excerpt from the unpublished memoirs of the last head of the Air Force's Project Blue Book. You read about his first UFO investigation, his feelings
toward astronomer J. Allen Hynek, and the most puzzling case of his watch--Socorro...
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The Earth's Second Moon
by Paul Schlyter
There's a word that's tailor-made for an idea like this--lunacy. But, as it happens, the "discovery" of the Earth's second moon has a respectable pedigree. Nor is it entirely wrong...
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Keen on Crop Circles
by Montague Keen
By all precedents it should have been a seven-year wonder, about ready to be interred alongside epidemics of Victorian ouija board messages or unexplained but evanescent outbreaks of mass hysteria, juvenile spoon-bending or localized UFO-spotting: but
the crop circle phenomenon shows no signs of abating. An agricultural journalist reports...34
Wired Spirits
by Steve Mizrach
The idea of contact with the dead is as old as the hills. But the medium through which the contact has taken place has undergone dramatic technological improvements in the past half century--from tape recorders and radios to telephones and computers. A
n anthropologist looks at these new wired spirits and finds trouble in cyberspace... 58
Dangerous Vision: The Phantom of Broad Mountain, Pennsylvania
by Gary S. Mangiacopra
Murder is the most hideous of crimes. But it's made even more ghastly when the murderer has disfigured his victim beyond recognition to hide his or her ghastly deed. Thus began the local legend of the Girl Phantom of Broad Mountain. For the residents o
f Schuylkill, Pennsylvania, the discovery of such a brutal murder shattered the quiet spring of 1925. So sensational was the murder that for the two weeks that followed, the local newspaper, the Pottsville Republican, carried almost daily accounts
of the state police investigations that tried to identify the unknown female victim and her escaped assailant...72
De Loys's Photograph: A Short Tale of Apes in Green Hell, Spider Monkeys, and Ameranthropoides loysi as Tools of Racism
by Loren Coleman and Michel Raynal
Perhaps the most famous photograph in cryptozoology is the snapshot of an animal, said to be an ape, seated on a wooden crate, taken in the rainforests of South America, allegedly in 1920. Adventurers, popular anthropologists and early cryptozoologists
have retold the story of this South American ape photograph so many times, that it has become one of the field's most celebrated illustrations . . . It is time to ask why the animal in the photo was promoted as an "ape"--instead of just being viewed as a
curious picture of a large spider monkey. The answer lies in racism...84
Screams From the Stream: Science Reacts to Forbidden Archeology
by Michael A. Cremo
The anthropologist Richard Leakey, like [Jonathan] Marks, reacted to Forbidden Archeology by name-calling rather than discussing the evidence reported in the book on its merits. In a letter to me dated November 8, 1993, Leakey said: "Your book
is pure humbug and does not deserve to be taken seriously by anyone but a fool. Sadly there are some, but that's part of selection and there is nothing that can be done."...94
An Egyptian State of Mind
by Colin Wilson
If the maverick Egyptologist Schwaller de Lubicz is right, the ancient Egyptians and their predecessors possessed some comprehensive knowledge system that offered them a unified view of the universe and human existence. If so, then the really important
question would be: What does it all mean? One implication, according to Schwaller, is that there must be some method of accelerating the pace of human evolution...104
The Mysterious Phenomenon of Loading.
by Betty Eisner with a comment by Larry Dossey
Some individuals take on the troubles of others, often experiencing the psychological and physical symptoms of the other. Eisner reports that this sharing or "loading" sometimes occurs between distant individuals who have no specific knowledge of what
is happening to each other. Dossey notes that researchers in parapsychology have long been aware of these distant phenomena. They are often referred to as "telesomatic" events, a term derived from Greek words meaning "the distant body."...128
Contributors....140