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Tuesday 4 June 2019

Which UFO Book(s) Do I Recommend?

I have books everywhere.  How many I have no idea and I always consider people who tell you the exact number off the tops of their heads to be either "collecting to show off" or a "bit special"!

My books are not for entertainment and in most you will see a lot of coloured post-it stickers.  These are either correcting errors in facts made by authors (who really only cribbed from other people), facts that I might need to refer to or to indicate cases referred to so that I can find all references to the Betty & Barney Hill, Antonio Villas Boas and other cases in all of those books.

I have two "occult" (ie ghosts) books often cited by Ufologists but which they have never read because they get the facts wrong: The Peat-Fire Flame and Strange Hauntings in Britain.


I have emails from VERY well known American Ufologists who have cited cases from these books but use snippets used by equally dubious people on internet sites, asking if I can forward data I find on the cases. Some of these people have used those cases for 30-40 years but just never could be bothered going to the easily available sources.

Did I update them?  No. I put it all into my factual and fully referenced books. 

Next to my copy of Ivan T. Sanderson's Great Jungles are 11 bulky volumes.


These books are, of course, John Hanson's Haunted Skies (the first set along with Dawn Holloway). I purchased one volume just to see if it might be of use. Within months I had purchased the whole set!  Those stickers in them are to bookmark cases and accounts -there is not one pointing to a misquote or badly reported case -almost unique in UFO books!

I was expecting a sort of A to Z format because of references to "the UFO encyclpaedia" and that is something hat might confuse people.  The books are, indeed, encyclopaedic but are not A-Z efforts but deal with specific periods by decades or years. 

I have been in this business since I was a teenager. Read many hundreds of journals, thousands of reports and far, far too many books so I thought I knew pretty much everything.  These books were a pretty hard slap in the face. Hanson and Holloway took newspaper reports and items in old flying saucer publications and did not just track down any original investigators still living but traced many witnesses and percipients in encounters -along the way correcting many of the false or inaccurate accounts that had been published.

In some cases it was like coming across the reports as though they were new -Close Encounters of the Third Kind, abductions, strange creatures connected in some way with UFOs (?) and, via a friendship Hanson made with Col. Charles Halt who was involved in the Rendlesham Forest incident -far, far more accurate details and facts on that case: sadly, 95% of Ufological material on the event is at best inaccurate and at worse, fiction. Of course, the case was dealt with in more detail in a book of its own -The Halt Perspective.



If I were asked to recommend UFO based books then Haunted Skies is top of the list and the series is now being updated.

It does not matter whether you are a UFO researcher, investigator or simply interested in the UFO phenomenon Haunted Skies should be on your bookshelf and I cannot praise it enough.

Haunted Skies
http://www.hauntedskies.co.uk/


The Halt Perspective
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Halt-Perspective-Haunted-skies-ebook/dp/B0784288MW

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