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Nancy Tremaine’s Second Book, Preordained, Follows-Up and Continues Her Uncanny Story of Alien Encounter and Life-Altering Aftermath

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Review by: KEN KORCZAK

For 50 years, Nancy Tremaine kept an astonishing secret.

Living in a small town on the outskirts of Detroit, she was just 12 years old in 1961 when an enormous flying saucer appeared low in the sky in her residential neighborhood not far from her home. Her best friend Cindy was with her – but the two girls were far from the only witnesses. The amazing object was seen by at least three police officers and other residents of Novi, Michigan.

If Nancy and Cindy had merely experienced a sighting – a close encounter of the first kind – it may have been merely a memory for a lifetime. But this was to be a deeply involved event that included the abduction of both girls. For Nancy, it was a highly intrusive physical and psychological confrontation with the unimaginable unknown.

Neither she nor Cindy would ever speak a word of what happened to them to anyone, not even their most intimate friends, family members or spouses – until a half a century later. The weight of this enormous secret exacted a heavy toll on both women. For Cindy, it may have been at the root of her lifetime of severe addiction to alcohol and nicotine, and her death.

NANCY TREMAINE gives all the details of what happened to her on that fateful day in her first book, SYMBIOSIS. (See my review HERE). It’s an uncanny account of nonstop high strangeness which has manifested and followed Tremaine throughout her life and continues to this day.

In this follow-up book, Preordained, the author continues to tell her story – because this is a story that can be truly said to have no end. Nothing ever “ended” for Nancy Tremaine after that fateful July 1961 day, even during her many years of living in denial. That’s why this new book (nor the previous) can’t be categorized simply as a “UFO book.” The complexity and the implications of Tremaine’s experiences are a demonstration that the “UFO phenomenon” has never really been just that. It is something much larger and more profound.

The picture that has begun to emerge in recent years within the UFO community and among those who study such things in-depth is that an encounter with an unidentified flying object is often a kind of symbolic representation of a greater reality. More and more, it’s becoming clear that people who are “experiencers” tend also to be the subjects of paranormal phenomena that run the gamut across a range of bizarre occurrences.

Nancy Tremaine

This can be everything from poltergeist activity to encounters with the dead and visitation by all manner of spiritual or otherworldly beings. Experiencers might hear disembodied voices speaking to them when they are alone or get eerie messages on their telephone answering machines. A common “side-effect” is persistent problems with electrical equipment, including the electronics of cars. Incidences of extremely strange, synchronistic coincidences are brought forward as are chance meetings with “strange people” who appear to be normal folks at first glance, but subsequently, turn out to be “something else.” And then there’s the MIB — Men In Black — encounters that are among the weirdest aspect of the phenomenon.

It is important to note that the happenings can also be positive. Some people have been healed of serious illnesses after their encounters, for example. Others develop loving relationships with the beings that once frightened them, abducted them and put them through terrifying experiences. Many subjects go on to achieve expanded states of consciousness and have Vedic or Buddhist-like enlightenment experiences, such as samadhi or the attainment of nirvana. Another reoccurring theme is coming to view all existence as a “grand cosmic oneness.” Religiously-charged and mythologically-charged occurences might also be viewed as positive — such as the many cases when experiences are visited by an apparition of a “Virgin Mary” or “Goddess Women” kind of figure.

This “all-of-the-above” scenario is being increasingly championed by those have been studying the UFO issue for decades. Prominent figures, such as Grant Cameron, Col. John Alexander, Dr. Jacques Vallee, Linda Moulton Howe, Dr. Simeon Hein and Rey Hernandez are just a few examples of those who concluded that the so-called UFO Phenomenon is a kind of “Pan Phenomenon.”

The Coombs family of Wales experienced intensive UFO sightings combined with wide-ranging, intrusive paranormal activity for months in the 1970s.

We also have excellent case studies of real-life people who live out this Pan Phenomenon. The most high-profile is undoubtedly Whitley Strieber, although his enormous, Hollywood-level celebrity and his relentless penchant for rolling out his story in a chronically controversial manner has made him a favorite punching bag for armies self-appointed and narrow-minded skeptics.

But there are other more down to earth experiencers who have been proven much more difficult to dismiss and attack because they are not celebrities and their cases enjoy the advantage of multiple witnesses and documented physical evidence – two of the best examples are CHRIS BLEDSOE of North Carolina and the stunning experiences of the Billy and Pauline Coombs family during the famous Welsh UFO flap of the late 1970s. But there are many more lesser-known experiencers, as well – such as DAVE SHOUP, PH.D., an agricultural engineer who enjoyed a stellar academic and scientific career while keeping his life-time contacts with UFOs, MIBs and other phenomena a secret. Once he retired and his career could no longer be damaged, Shoup decided to “come clean” in a book about his experiences. (NOTE: My review of Shoup’s UFOs FIRST PERSON: A LIFETIME OF SECRECY is pending).

Nancy Tremaine’s Preordained is an important book because it vividly illustrates yet another person who is experiencing this highly multifaceted Pan Phenomenon – especially since she decided it was time to break her silence and come forward to tell her story to the world. The paranormal episodes she encounters are wide-ranging.

To take just one bizarre example – Tremaine was having a telephone conversation with a friend. She was not touching her smartphone at the time – it lay beside her on a table with speakerphone enabled. Tremaine began to hear buttons being pressed. On the screen, a series of numbers appeared, seemingly at random. But when she Googled the number series it turned out to be a U.S. Patent Office number – it was the patent number for “a movable ground-based recovery system for a hovercraft landing system.” The equipment is associated with NASA’s Spitzer Telescope project and its SOFIA project.

Spitzer Space Telescope

A second series of numbers when Googled turned out to be a homo sapiens gene ID number representing GPAM, glycerol-3-phosphate acyltransferase, mitochondrial.

Furthermore, the person she was speaking to had his own inexplicable experience while Tremaine was watching the numbers pop up on her phone. He could hear the disembodied eerie voice of a woman calling out numbers — he was alone in his apartment during the call.

Nancy Tremaine relates a number of other high strangeness events in Preordained, and I won’t tell you any more of them here because I don’t want to spoil the book for you. Rest assured, however, that you’ll be vexed and amazed at the numerous incidents of baffling and paranormally weird experiences this woman has confronted and endured.

Former Police Chief Lee BeGole of Novi, Michigan, with the author

Finally, what impressed me the most about Preordained is how Nancy Tremaine illustrates her dogged and heroic efforts to prove that what happened to her that day so many years ago in 1961 was not something she imagined or made up. Her ace in the hole, so to speak, is the 90-something former police chief of Novi, Michigan, Lee BeGole, a deeply respected figure in his community and a man of unimpeachable character and sound mind. Chief BeGole is in a position to verify the events surrounding the 1961 UFO sighting because he directed his officers to respond to the scene when phone calls began coming into the police station from freaked-out residents of the neighborhood where it happened. His deputies reported back to him what they saw in real-time via radio. BeGole also tells of other people who approached him to report sighting the object.

For Tremaine, such corroborating support that a UFO really did hover over the residential neighborhood of her small town on that day means the rest of her story is underpinned by a powerful measure of authenticity. Tremaine called Chief Lee BeGole, “The bravest man I have ever known” for putting his reputation on the line for telling the truth.

This review is already overlong, but I must add a final note that’s critically important. Nancy Tremaine does something in these pages I think is vital for people to understand – and that is, despite the paradigm-shattering nature of her experiences, Nancy shows her self to be an “ordinary” and “real” person like anyone else, just trying to live her life, pay her rent, work at her job and go home in the evening to enjoy some peace and downtime.

Without asking for it or knowing why, she was thrust into an extraordinary situation – yet she still must endeavor to have a normal life among everyday people amid what everyone has judged to be societal norms.

For example, she tells of her time working as a nurse’s aide in an elderly care facility and shares her insights at the many absurdities in the way our society handles people who are extremely old and well-beyond having an existence of true meaning. We tie them into chairs or strap them into beds and use all manner of artificial means to keep them breathing and their feeble hearts pumping for another day, even when the extremely aged would prefer not to. (Note: I worked my way through college as a nurse’s aide, so I can attest to the authentic nature of Tremaine’s experience).

Another example is the story of how she adopted her beautiful little black cat, Joy, from a shelter. It seems a simple story, but for me the impact was profound. That’s because this vignette, again, shows a normal person, like anyone you know, doing something kind and simple and yearning for the companionship of a wonderful creature.

So, look around you – and have a care. Always be ready to understand. It may be your neighbor, a co-worker, the check-out girl you chat-up at the grocery store, the delivery man who delivers a package or pizza to your doorstep, or a member of your own immediate family. It might be your doctor or lawyer. It’s possible they’re living with an enormous secret and doing their best to cope with it, even when it seems impossible to know how.

IMPORTANT NOTE: I received an advanced copy of this book from the author for review. Publication is forthcoming via FLYING DISC PRESS.

Ken Korczak is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer, served as an advocate for homeless people as a VISTA Volunteer, and taught journalism at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: BIRD BRAIN GENIUS

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Whitley Strieber’s Afterlife Revolution Breaks Little New Ground But Is Worthy Addition to Survival of Death Literature

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Review by: KEN KORCZAK

The great thing about reading a Whitley Strieber book is that you’re getting a Whitley Stieber book.

The bad thing about reading a Whitley Stieber book is that you’re getting a Whitley Strieber book.

I’ve been a reader of Strieber since he published his first novel in 1978, The Wolfen. This was made into a fine feature film starring Albert Finney. His next work of fiction also got Hollywood treatment. That was The Hunger, published in 1981. The movie version featured a megawatt cast of David Bowie, Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve.

Other successful novels followed. Whitley Strieber was like a more intellectual and elegant Steven King. His books may not have enjoyed spectacular Steven King-like sales, but he developed a significant following and was considered a premier fiction writer of his time.

Then, in 1985, everything changed for Whitley. That was the year he experienced what could only be described at the time as visitation by aliens, the ET kind, not the border-jumping kind. He wrote a book about it that came out in 1987 – the now famous and infamous COMMUNION. Whitely Strieber’s life would never be the same, including his standing in the literary community.

To add insult to injury to the collective egos of the snobby New York literary elites, Communion sold about a gazillion copies. It parked itself on the NYT bestseller list for weeks. It was also made into a bizarre movie starring Christopher Walken. The controversial American scholar Jason Reza Jorjani called the movie, “a surrealist masterpiece.” It was directed by Philippe Mora.

Communion also sent Strieber’s lofty literary career into a wild spin from which Strieber has never re-emerged. After Communion, he entered the Land of New Age Woo Woo – which can be a lucrative niche in and of itself – but his days as an “acceptable” mainstream author seemed finished.

It is difficult to tell if this fate for Strieber was by his choice or the result of the unexpected furor that erupted over Communion and careened out of control. But consider that he wrote several sequels to Communion. If Communion was an out-of-control situation – Strieber seemed to have decided to just roll with it. He was consciously choosing the path he wanted to take.

He remains a significant figure in the paranormal space – esoteric, New Age, occult, ufology, mysticism, psychic stuff – whatever you want to call it. The thing about Whitely is that his work straddles all these categories. Pinning him down as a just “UFO guy” or a “New Ager” will never hit the mark.

Anne and Whitely

So, this latest book is about the survival of death. THE AFTERLIFE REVOLUTION comes in the wake of the death of his beloved wife, Anne, in 2015. The gist of the book is Strieber’s belief and presented evidence that his wife has continued her existence in the Afterlife and has managed to reestablish contact with him. This book is billed as a bona fide collaboration with the spirit of Anne, who only departed physically. She remains an active, living presence for Strieber today. Anne Strieber is credited on the cover as a co-author.

To be honest, even though Strieber leverages the word “Revolution” in his title, I found very little that was revolutionary in terms of advancing the study of contact with deceased individuals. Don’t get me wrong – there’s some intriguing and authentic stuff offered in these pages – but Strieber offers little (in my view) that goes beyond the hundreds of other books written on this topic over many decades now.

Yes, Strieber is correct in calling it an “Afterlife Revolution.” It’s just that, it began about 150 years ago. (I won’t discuss what the Egyptians were doing in this realm thousands of year ago). In modern times, it was around the mid-1800s that an explosion of interest in seances, table rapping, automatic writing, Ouija board work, trance channeling, spirit writing and mediumship began to spread across European high society and elements of American society.

I’m sure I have read more than 300 books about making contact with the departed. I mention this because a lot of them provide evidence of survival than goes well beyond what Strieber is offering in Afterlife Revolution. I have reviewed many of them on this website. Here are just a few recent examples that you will find here:

RAYMOND or Life and Death by Sir Oliver Lodge — Published 1916

STRANGE VISITORS edited by Henry J. Horn – Published 1871

AFTERLIFE CONVERSATIONS WITH KEN KESEY by William Bedivere — Published 2009

WOLF’S MESSAGE by Susan Giesemann

AFTERLIFE CONVERSATIONS WITH HEMINGWAY by Frank DeMarco

THE BOY WHO DIED AND CAME BACK by Robert Moss

NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCES by P.M.H. Atwater

GHOSTS I HAVE SEEN by Violet Tweedale — Published 1920

I list this short selection to show just a few examples of works that make a more robust evidential case for the survival of death than does The Afterlife Revolution. There are others, of course, such as the work of DR. STAFFORD BETTY of the University of California.

That’s doesn’t mean Strieber’s book is not a worthy addition to the record. Also, because it is a Whitely Strieber book, it’s well written. I found the stories of Anne’s travails as she battled worsening illness and harrowing trips to hospitals and emergency rooms heart wrenching and profound. Whitley was at her side every step of the way and he masterfully captures the anxiety, fear, sense of hopelessness and desperation as it becomes increasingly clear that the days of his beloved spouse’s sojourn on earth are coming to an end.

My heart goes out to Whitely Strieber for his loss and ordeal, and I know all readers will feel the same.

But now a short additional discussion about Whitely Strieber:

I find Strieber to be among the most vexing of authors to read. He has done an invaluable service to his fellow human beings by sharing the sensational phenomena he has encountered in life — for which he has paid a heavy price.

He has been gleefully savaged by so-called skeptics who belong to the fundamentalist religion of material science. Sure, that comes with the territory for anyone willing to write about personal confrontations with the paranormal, but Strieber has been singled out like few others for some of the most vicious, caustic and flesh-tearing attacks I have seen. It’s largely unfair.

At the same time, it’s painful for me to admit, as an admirer, that Whitely Stieber has brought much of it upon himself. For starters, he has made public claims that are demonstrably untrue – such as saying he personally witnessed the 1966 infamous Texas Tower Shooting shooting at the University of Austin perpetrated by Charles Whitman and killing 17 people. It seems clear he did not, and he has changed his own story about the event a number of times. Even his mother said he wasn’t there.

But Strieber has also created genuine problems for himself by seeming to often mix elements of his fictional works with his books of nonfiction. His ever-hounding pack of critics has pointed to specific passages that appeared in his novels which reappear in his nonfiction. (Note: This can be more complicated because Whitley may not view the differences between reality and imagination in the common way — but that’s a complicated issue I must leave aside here).

Another way that Strieber gets himself into trouble – and this is subtle — is that he is a fantastic marketer of himself. Before he embarked on his literary career, Strieber was a bona fide “Mad Man” – as in the television show about the advertising business. I’m not saying Strieber was debauched ala Roger Sterling or Don Draper – but his advertising background comes across (to me, anyway) when I hear Whitely speak or tune into his podcast, UNKNOWN COUNTRY, where he frequently pitches his own books and other things he wants to sell, such as memberships to his Patreon site.

I know what I’m saying is fantastically unfair – Whitley has every right to promote his stuff and earn a living – but when someone is as good at selling,  one must fight off that notion that whispers into the mind: “I’m really being SOLD something here.” Again, I strenuously emphasize that it’s monumentally unfair of me to even say this – so why do I? It’s because my larger point is that — I think the smooth way he pitches his stuff tends to work against him in an unexpected, perhaps even subconscious way in the court of public opinion.

Now I’ll address what is the biggest factor which troubles me the most about Whitely Strieber. It’s the undeniable fact that he is a superb merchant of fear. I think of my sister who once told me that only two works of art prompted her to sleep with the lights on for three months. The first was viewing The Exorcist. The second was reading Communion. In fact, that’s one of the most common kinds of comments I have heard from people over the years who have read Communion. They all say something like: “That book really scared the shit out of me!”

Keep in mind that Strieber began his career as a writer of horror fiction. The Wolfen and The Hunger were not so much blood and gore as they were vehicles of deep psychological terror. But the contract we all have with fictional horror is that we agree to or ask for what is being offered. We willingly plunge into the pages of a horror novel eager for chills and unsettling scenarios – psychologists suggest we like to read horror because it serves as a kind of inoculation against real fear and terror, much the same way a weakened version of the flu virus in a vaccine serves as a prophylactic against the flu itself.

But with Communion, Whitley enters our minds through a loophole in the common literary contract. The work is offered as something that is true and real – and also something that could easily happen to anyone of us. It is extremely difficult to defend ourselves from this form of psychic intrusion. What if it’s real? What if bizarre aliens can come into our homes, into our bedrooms and do anything they want to us – including subjecting us to the most personal and intrusive manner of medical experiments. What if they can control our minds and manipulate every aspect of our lives? Are we little more than rats in a cage for them? What then?

By Calistemon – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12853851

Even when Strieber is writing hopeful, inspirational books – such as The Afterlife Revolution – he can’t help but slip in an element of visceral horror. In this case, he relates an episode with frightening giant spiders – dripping with evil — which he said appeared over the bed of his wife and threatened to drop down on her sleeping form.

The same is true for another recent Strieber book – The Key. Here Strieber lays out for us apocalyptic scenarios that are unsettling to the core. Massive global warming, floods, natural disasters, death and destruction are part of the message Strieber’s messenger from another dimension regales him with during a series of mysterious meetings.

By Sailko – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39809967

I could go on, but here’s the point: Strieber’s works have injected massive doses of fear into our society. This comes at a heavy cost. The opposite of love is not hate – the opposite of love is fear, although hate is a byproduct of fear. When millions of people are prompted to vibrate the energy of fear, the effect cascades across the collective consciousness of humanity. Think of the way a pebble dropped onto the still surface of a pond sends waves across the whole system. Or think of the way one section of a spider web getting plucked sends a shivering message across the whole network.

For better or worse – and even if we might say he is justified in doing so – Whitely Strieber tends to generate fear with his works, even when he’s attempting to relate us a story of hope and wonder, as in the glorious notion that we all survive death

That’s what’s vexing about Whitley Strieber. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Ken Korczak is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer, served as an advocate for homeless people as a VISTA Volunteer, and taught journalism at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: BIRD BRAIN GENIUS

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William and Susan Buhlman Explore Implications of the OBE in Fictional Form With “Astral Travel” Themed Short Stories

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Review by: KEN KORCZAK

For decades William Buhlman has been among the world’s best-known and passionate advocates of the out-of-body experience (OBE). He doesn’t mind calling it “astral travel” now and then or referring to that place you go to when you are “out there” the “astral plane” or “astral world.”

The term out-of-body experience, or OBE, was adopted by many a few years ago, probably because astral travel seemed “Old World” or archaic. It hearkened back to times when this sort of thing was the realm of occult practitioners steeped in mystical or eastern religious belief systems.

It is the noted psychologist and research scientist Dr. Charles Tart who is credited with coining the term OBE. It was the great Robert Monroe who popularized the term. His three classic books about out-of-body travel, starting with Journeys Out of Body, raised the subject out of the esoteric and occult world into the mainstream — if it can be said out-of-body travel is mainstream today. Probably not yet but it’s getting there. At the very least, it has gained wider acceptance.

It was folks like Tart and Monroe who brought scientific methodology to the study of OBEs.

William Buhlman

Buhlman’s approach can be said to be scientific in that he pursued his study of OBEs with exacting documentation, dogged determination and constant experimentation. He is not a scientist, but neither is he a mystic. One might say he’s an ordinary guy who one day developed an extraordinary desire to not only study the OBE, but to take the experiences to the highest levels of experience and understanding he could achieve.

That theme – striving to go as high as and far as you can go – Buhlman has passionately maintained throughout several books as well as his many lectures and seminars. He teaches OBE practice at the Monroe Institute in Faber, Virginia.

Susan Buhlman

In this book of short stories, co-written with his wife, Susan Buhlman, the authors are leveraging the power of fiction to dramatize the many facets of what Mr. Buhlman has learned from his many years of exploring the “astral realms.”

It’s an attempt to illustrate the deeper implications of the idea that human beings are more than just a physical body. Buhlman says we are multidimensional beings. If we can learn to master the OBE, we can experience an unlimited number of exotic environments in far-flung trans-physical locations – or just call it Consciousness, with a big “C.”

The first offering – The Boy Who Could Fly — is obviously meant to be a children’s story. It’s one I dearly wish I had available to me when I was eight or nine years old. The fear it would have alleviated and the confusion it would have cleared up for my boyhood self would have been life-altering. During that time, I began experiencing almost nightly the fantastically frightening phenomenon of sleep paralysis. My mind would come awake in a physical body that was 100% numb and seemed frozen solid – the experience was infinitely more terrorizing because I simply had no of understanding what was happening to me.

I eventually discovered – but years later — that sleep paralysis is a fantastically good thing because it can serve as a launching pad for out-of-body travel. If I would have had this book back then – well, let’s just say it would have saved me a lot of grief!

The rest of the 13 short stories presented will serve a similar function for readers of all age groups. The OBE is presented as a natural ability that all human beings have access to. It should be plucked out of the realm of the paranormal, mystical or supernatural and be embraced as a pathway toward a greater understanding of what it means to be a nonphysical entity experiencing life as a physical being on the material earthly plane.

Just as the first story would have been a welcome resource for my 8-year-old self, I think these stories will be illuminating and helpful for people confronting some of the biggest and most difficult aspects of life that touch us all eventually – especially confronting death and dying and the grief associated with the death of a loved one. These stories provide a perspective on what the death of the physical body truly is – and isn’t. It’s not the end, it’s a transition. Furthermore, no one has to take the word of William Buhlman (or anyone) on this matter. We can all prove out these concepts for ourselves by trying our own hand at the OBE.

My initial overall impression of these stories is that they are simple and straightforward, almost to a fault. I sometimes felt they bordered on being excessively maudlin or even trite. But after reading all of the stories I came away thinking the Buhlman’s handled this delicate topic in just the right way. Their light touch brings lofty issues down to a universally accessible sense of understanding.

Readers from age 8 to 80 will benefit from the perspectives presented here on the true nature of our reality and what it means to be a human being – that we are multidimensional entities navigating a fantastic journey through an infinite field of Consciousness.

PLEASE CHECK OUT MY REVIEWS OF OTHER BOOKS ON THE OBE TOPIC, LINKED BELOW:

EYES OF AN ANGEL by Paul Elder

CRASH & BURN by Peter Ludvick

EXPLORATIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS By Frederick Aadema

BABE IN THE WOODS By Frank DeMarco

Ken Korczak is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer, served as an advocate for homeless people as a VISTA Volunteer, and taught journalism at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: BIRD BRAIN GENIUS

All NEW: KEN’S BOOK REVIEW SITE ON FACEBOOK: REMOTE BOOK REVIEWING

 

Retro Review: Brilliant British Physicist Sir Oliver Lodge Brought Scientific, Experimental Methods To Explore Possibility Of Life After Death

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Review by: KEN KORCZAK

SIR OLIVER LODGE was a top tier scientist of his day. His reputation stands perhaps on the edge of greatness. If he wasn’t in the genius league of, say, a Max Planck or Michael Faraday, he was certainly a figure of historic significance in the field of experimental physics.

His work with syntonics (we call it “tuning” today) was a key development in the invention of radio. He was later involved in a patent dispute with Guglielmo Marconi over a component essential to the development of wireless transmission, a case which Lodge eventually won.

His work also led to the invention of something most of us use every day in our cars – spark plugs. The first commercially available spark plugs were known as “Lodge Igniters.”

He was more than a theoretical physicist. He was an applied scientist who created practical, hands-on devices that worked. This makes Sir Oliver a perfect candidate to study the possibility of life after death. He can’t be dismissed as just another of the flaky New Agers of his day – the many spiritualist or occultists who were conducting séances and practicing all sorts of arcane arts, from mediumship and automatic writing to table knocking and Ouija board channeling.

Sir Oliver Lodge was a plodding, detailed oriented researcher intensely focused on hard evidence gained from experimentation and fact-based results. These excellent qualities of the scientist would come in handy for Lodge after his beloved son, Raymond, a promising young engineer, went off to fight the Germans in World War I and was killed in battle.

Raymond Lodge

Raymond was just 25. If he would have returned from war his future was bright. His excellent grasp of mathematics and natural knack for mechanics all-but guaranteed a fulfilling career as an engineer, a role he had already been pursuing at a firm owned by his brothers. The Lodge family was wealthy and held high social status in Victorian England. Raymond was handsome and charming to boot.

His life was tossed away in the senseless slaughter of World War I.

Even before Raymond’s death, his father had demonstrated a keen interest in life-after-death issues. He was among the first members of the British SOCIETY FOR PSYCHICAL RESEARCH (SPR). He helped found it along with other such luminaries as, chemist Sir William Crookes, Nobel laureate Charles Richet and the American “Father of Psychology” William James. The SPR was dedicated to the study of paranormal phenomenon.

Because I have read a number of books from this era of widespread interest in the occult – especially on séances and the survival of death – I was expecting largely “more of the same” from RAYMOND OR LIFE & DEATH (download free). I’m pleased to say I was wrong. I should not have underestimated that esteemed, distinguished and intellectual gentleman — Sir Oliver Lodge.

This book is divided into three parts, only one of which Lodge describes as “supernormal.”

The first section represents and ingenious tactic by Sir Oliver. He wants to introduce us to his son, but he also desires that readers get know him on a deeper level for the wonderful person he was. To accomplish this, he let’s Raymond do all the talking, so to speak – that is, Lodge presents a selection of letters Raymond wrote while serving on the front lines of Belgium.

Sir Oliver Lodge, born 1851, died 1940

The effect is profound. Little by little, letter by letter, Raymond’s delightful personality comes forward. It soon becomes apparent that here was a marvelous young man who was intelligent and kind, brave and modest – and we get the sense that he possessed a natural caring, empathetic character. He was a curious, enthusiastic and gentle soul thrust into the horrors of war. Yet, he was bearing the gruesome daily reality of gritty combat with uncanny humor and sunny attitude.

And then – suddenly — a punch in the gut!

We get to the last of Raymond’s letter … and the next page is the report that he died a violent death on the battlefield. For me, the effect was wrenching. It was as if I had just made a new friend – and then, abruptly, he was dead.

The next section of the book is the “supernormal” stuff. Sir Oliver, his wife Lady (Mary) Lodge and his sons and daughters embark on an intense effort to develop contact with the spirit of Raymond. (The Lodges had 12 children).

British Medium: Gladys Osborne Leonard

This effort is conducted largely through the agency of mediums, one of which was the controversial GLADYS OSBORNE LEONARD. Several other mediums were engaged as well, including a certain prominent “Mrs. Kennedy of London, wife of Dr. Kennedy.” She was a medium but also apparently a gifted automatic writer.

An initial contact with Raymond came from overseas by way of one of the most scientifically examined and tested mediums in history – LENORA PIPER of New Hampshire. She was deemed “authentic” by William James and British researcher Richard Hodgson who subjected her to hundreds of tests controlled by rigorous scientific protocols.

Another frequent method of afterlife communication studied by Sir Oliver was “table tilting.” This is a fantastically tedious method is which séance sitters place their hands flat atop a small table – and sort of Ouija board style – they ask for contact with the spirit world. Then they ask specific questions once a presence on the “other side” is indicated by certain movements of the table. Even though hands are touching the table, the belief was that movements of the table  was being initiated by the spirits and not the involuntary hand movement of the participants.

The attendees ask a question. If it is a “yes or “no” question, the table tilts three time to indicate “yes” and one time to indicate “no.”

Table tipping to communicate with spirits

But the really laborious part begins when they want the spirit to spell out answers to open-ended questions. In this case, the medium or séance leader asks a question, such as, “What is your name?” She then begins to call out the letters of the alphabet. Now let’s say the spirit’s name is “Paul.” When the facilitator gets to letter “P” the table tilts to indicate a “stoppage” for that letter. Then they start repeating the alphabet from the beginning.

It will tilt again at “A” then at “U” and then at “L” – and so they get the name “Paul” after having to go through the alphabet from the beginning each time.

Of course, skeptics shovel scorn upon all this. They think its obvious that the people placing their hands on the table are the one’s doing all the tilting – albeit with involuntary muscle control. This is the same skeptic’s explanation given for the action of the Ouija board. It’s called the ideomotor effect or ideomotor phenomenon.

Sir Oliver readily acknowledges that involuntary muscular control may offer a partial explanation for the table tilting phenomenon. However, he writes:

“Unconscious guidance can hardly be excluded … but first, our desire was rather in the direction of avoiding such control; and second, the stoppages were sometimes at unexpected places; and third, a long succession of letters soon becomes meaningless. Except to the recorder who is writing them down silently as they are called to him in another part of the room.”

In short, Sir Oliver comes away from many hours of table tilting study concluding that, “table tipping is an incipient physical phenomenon and that though the energy comes from the people … it does not appear to be applied in quite a normal way.”

Again, skeptics howl with ridicule at this. And yet … there is much more to table tipping. During these sessions, the table was often experienced to levitate. The table also evinced varieties of other movements and indications, including moving or “walking” across a room. Participants stayed with the table all the time with hands flat on top.

In one extraordinary chapter, Sir Oliver’s wife, Mary, describes a session during a social gathering at the Lodge family manse, Mariemont. An impromptu decision was made to place hands on a table to see if Raymond was present. The table indicated that he was. With hands positioned flat on the table, it walked around the room and at several points, levitated. Mary Lodge writes:

“I took one hand off (the table) leaving one hand on top, and Honor’s (Oliver and Mary’s daughter) two hands lying on the top, no part of them being over the edge, and I measured the height the legs were off the ground. The first time it was the width of three fingers, and the next time four fingers … I tried to press it down but could not – a curious feeling, like pressing on a cushion of air.”

When someone began playing the piano, the table edged its way over and began to tap against the back of the player in time with the music. This motion was so vigorous that the table tilters found it necessary to place a pillow between the player and the table to cushion the action of the table.

And so — by way of mediums speaking in trance, table tipping and automatic writing — Sir Oliver Lodge and his family became convinced that Raymond survived death. This determination was made through a lot of questioning, including “test questions,” which ask for information that only those who were intimate with Raymond could have known. Raymond’s brothers would ask about small, incidental things that happened only among themselves. For example, on a particular automobile outing one day, the muffler of their car was damaged going down a hill. Raymond, speaking through a medium, described the incident. The medium could not have known anything about it.

Initially, and in many cases, they selected mediums that were total strangers so he/she could have had no foreknowledge of or about the spirit he/she was channeling for the “sitter.” 

The Lodges eventually flesh out the details of what life is like for Raymond on the other side. They ask about his environment, what his world is like, where and how he is living “over there.” Raymond calls his location “Summerland,” an idyllic earth-like environment which is just as solid as physical existence among the living on earth. He even lives in a cottage constructed of bricks. There are lots of other people there, buildings, towns and special halls that are like universities where they study advanced topics, and so forth.

But this picture develops slowly. Initially, Raymond’s perception and reports come across as being more dreamlike. Things shift and change at the whim of one’s thoughts. It seems analogous to what it’s like when we are experiencing a vivid dream, or perhaps a lucid dream. As Raymond gets more acclimated to his new situation, he seems to gain solid footing in the afterlife realm. It can be as firm and earth-like as he wants it to be, but it doesn’t necessarily have to stay that way. It’s a matter of creating or projecting one’s own virtual reality based on one’s thoughts, choices, perception, creativity and more.

Image courtesy of NASA

Raymond takes on the role of a “Helper” in his transformed existence. That is, he assists in the orientation of other people as they die and enter the afterlife realm. Business is brisk because of the war. Raymond expresses his profound gratitude to other special guides who took him under their wings (so to speak) and helped him to become oriented and acclimated to his exotic new afterlife environment.

Apparently, it takes a while to clear out the cobwebs and come to grips with that fact that one has shed the physical form and is now living in another, more etheric kind of body in a more fluid realm – yet a place that can be every bit as solid and “real’ as was life on the earthly plane.

Raymond comes to think of his former physical body as, “an old coat I have shed and no longer need or care about.”

In addition to his role as a Helper, Raymond is eager to work with his father to prove that there is no death. In fact, he says this work is extremely important. He thinks it is vital that living people on earth understand that life goes on and in a way that it is even better than physical life on earth, though It’s not a final, idyllic paradise or heaven. People, or souls, must continue onward with new challenges to learn, grow and strive to move higher up the ladder of consciousness and existence.

Raymond tells amazing stories of meeting advanced beings that have transcended to loftier levels of existence. They sometimes “come down” to his level to teach and encourage the recently dead to work toward advancement so that they, too, can move on to more sublime realms.

And there’s a lot more. We get numerous, tantalizing glimpses about life on the other side of death as reported by  Raymond – albeit transmitted imperfectly due to a certain amount of garbled translation because the information is filtered through the brains of mediums, table tilting and automatic writing.

Sir Oliver Lodge and “student” depicted on the Victory Monument, Derby Square, Liverpool,

The third part of the book are a series of essays by Sir Oliver. They are part scientific theory, part philosophy and part opinions formed through his years-long study of supernormal phenomenon and communications with the departed.

They’re well worth reading. I came away with the impression that Sir Oliver was a man ahead of his time, especially in terms of challenging the established, mainstream scientific community for its pervasive unwillingness to consider study of  life after death as legitimate inquiry because of hardened, preconceived notions of what is deemed to be “real” and what is not. Sir Oliver believed that science had become mired in a narrow box of limited belief systems similar to that of religious fundamentalists.  Scientists, like religious dogmatists, refuse to accept anything outside of their own articles of faith based on unquestioning “belief.”

Sir Oliver Lodge endured withering criticism from his distinguished peers for his courage to look directly at the issue of life after death. They derided his willingness to tackle it with the same methodologies he used to study the physics of electricity. He was adept at giving back as good as he got, however, making his case through his eloquent essays and measured responses. He never devolves to pointless bickering or making bitter reprisals against his detractors.

In every respect, Raymond or Life & Death is a remarkable work by a great man, a driven scientist and courageous thinker.



BELOW ARE LINKS TO MY REVIEWS OF BOOKS SIMILAR TO THIS TOPIC:

STRANGE VISITORS edited by Henry J. Horn

GHOSTS I HAVE SEEN by Violet Tweedale

THE BETTY BOOK by Stewart Edward White

THE GHOST OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY by Frank DeMarco

Ken Korczak is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer, served as an advocate for homeless people as a VISTA Volunteer, and taught journalism at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: BIRD BRAIN GENIUS

All NEW: KEN’S BOOK REVIEW SITE ON FACEBOOK: REMOTE BOOK REVIEWING

Sociologist Simeon Hein Warns Denial of UFO And Other Anomalous Phenomenon Could Have Unexpected Consequences For Human Race

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Review by: KEN KORCZAK

So SIMEON HEIN is a guy with some serious academic chops. He holds a PhD in sociology which he earned at Washington State University in 1992. He’s into things like nonlinear research methods, statistical analysis and technological determinism.

He’s also into a lot of stuff that makes mainstream scientists grind their teeth, such as UFOs, remote viewing and crop circle research. One is tempted to say that Dr. Hein is himself a kind of Black Swan — you know, an outlier, someone willing to dally with the fringe — or should we say the leading edge?

 

But first, what is this reference to Black Swan that Hein uses in the title of this book?”

The Black Swan Theory is that which states that certain events can happen that are totally unpredicted and unexpected, can produce a major effect, often hugely negative — but are then rationalized after the fact with the advantage of 20/20 hindsight.

The concept was first put forward by the Lebanese-American intellectual and scholar NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB. Simeon Hein’s book title is a play on Taleb’s 2007 highly influential book, THE BLACK SWAN.

UFO witness Louise Voves.

So this book presents a series of case studies of unexpected events that Hein calls Black Swan Ghosts. It’s things that are not supposed to happen, or even exists, yet they do happen and they apparently do exist. An example Hein provides is that of a wonderful Idaho lady by the name of Louise Voves. She was picking huckleberries in a remote rural area with her brother one day in the 1970s when a gigantic “tortoise-shell” shaped UFO suddenly appeared over a nearby treeline and maneuvered around right before their eyes and at close range.

There was no mistaking this object for anything known, man-made or natural. The object created significant marks on the grass below. It was seen by several other witnesses as well. When Louise reported the sighting to police, things quickly get all Blacky Swany.

The police must have informed the military because troops quickly descend at the sighting location and banish all “ordinary” citizens from the area. They tell Louise that she must not only forget about picking huckleberries in this prime spot, but she should also forget what she saw and never speak of it again. Army and Air Force personnel are on the scene for several days, but the incident gets no press coverage and the military clams up — it’s like it never happened.

But wait — this event may be a “Black Swan Ghost” event in itself although it does not constitute an overarching Black Swan scenario.

Simeon Hein PhD

The singular event is wholly unexpected, yes, but we can’t say it produces a large-scale effect. It’s localized at best. One also cannot say it is rationalized with 20/20 hindsight, although many UFO sightings are rationalized. But the Voves sighting is not so much rationalized as it is denied and covered up, and for authorities, hopefully forgotten.

But If I understand Dr. Hein’s thesis correctly, he’s more concerned about the meta-analysis here. He’s not just pointing to individual cases, but the thousands of UFO encounters similar (and many far stranger) to that of Louise Voves. They’ve been happening from at least that day in 1947 when pilot Kenneth Arnold made arguably the first postmodern UFO sighting report.

Hein says that the way our government, media, culture and society has been handling the UFO phenomenon for some 70 years may invoke a large-scale Black Swan scenario in the near future. It holds the potential to create a widespread impact on all the people of earth. He warns of the possibility of a kind of culture shock that will shake the collective psychology of the human race to the core.

In other words, once day the dam of secrecy may burst. The years of cover-ups, the official lying and overzealous use of the “Top Secret” classification system, the inability or unwillingness of the media to report the story and general public apathy will one day all fall away — the truth will be undeniable — it will be stunning — and our major institutions will be rattled.

Furthermore, Hein says there is plenty of blame to go around — and this is where I give Simeon Hein very high marks, indeed. That’s because most prominent ufologists today keep of a steady drumbeat of blame for UFO secrecy against the usual suspects — the government, the media and the military industrial complex.

Certainly, Hein takes his shots at these entities as well, but consider this passage from Black Swan Ghosts:

“It’s pretty clear that it’s not just the federal government that’s withholding secrets about this issue. The public as a whole wants it this way or they would be demanding more information. It’s clear that the federal government has black budget programs around this issue. However, the public seems to trust that the government knows what it’s doing or they would demand more. They could easily pick up the phone and call their Senator of Congressperson. But they don’t.

“They don’t because it is easier not to know. The public wants to keep ignoring the elephant in the room and then blame the government for the secrecy rather than take the responsibility. It’s just a whole lot easier to pretend you can’t do anything about it.”

Thank you Dr. Simeon Hein!

This is why we need more sociologists in ufology. They have a broader perspective on the complexity of the matrix that makes up society. Government, the media, the military and corporations don’t exist or operate in a vacuum. The general public is also a primary, fundamental player and a key element that contributes to the overall situation as it exists today. Few of our most prominent ufologists today ever make this leap.

This is a juncture where I’m tempted to launch into a more in-depth analysis of the social dynamics of how all this works — but that will take me far astray of what’s supposed to be a book review of Black Swan Ghosts.

I’ll just close with some additional notes:

• An excellent feature of the ebook format of this book are video links to the UFO cases cited. They’re terrific and lend great weight and credibility to the stories presented.

• UFO events are not the only category of example used by Hein to make his Black Swan case. He also takes a look at cold fusion, the overwhelming scientific evidence for biological-microbial fossils existent in rocks from Mars and meteorites, crop circle phenomenon, remote viewing and more.

• Hein writes well. His presents his narrative in clear, concise language that’s palatable to a general audience while also including enough thoughtful, academic gristle to make this a work of depth that challenges the reader and makes a call for action.

• Hein has established an organization he calls the Mount Baldy Institute.  Its website is HERE. His YouTube channel also provides many entertaining and edifying videos which you can find HERE.

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Ken Korczak is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer, served as an advocate for homeless people as a VISTA Volunteer, and taught journalism at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: BIRD BRAIN GENIUS

All NEW: KEN’S BOOK REVIEW SITE ON FACEBOOK: REMOTE BOOK REVIEWING

The Reluctant Messenger By Psychologist Candice M. Sanderson Is Marvelous Example Of Channeled, Transcendent Literature At Its Best

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Review by: KEN KORCZAK

The Zen tradition has a saying that goes something like this: “You cannot go to enlightenment; enlightenment must come to you.”

That might be a good adage to describe the experience of CANDICE M. SANDERSON, a pragmatic, hard-working, by-the-book psychologist who was minding her own business one day when when transcendence suddenly came knocking, unbidden and out of the blue. No one could have been more shocked than her.

After all, a psychologist might tell you that hearing voices is an indication of mental illness. So here we have a psychologist who found herself questioning her own sanity … and yet, the communications she was receiving from “Out There” didn’t have the characteristics of delusion or perhaps some sort of cognitive deterioration of a woman now edging into her sixties. Just the opposite. The messages she was getting were soft, coherent and elegant, almost lyrical. The information was exotic, but certainly not “crazy.”

Despite agonizing self doubt and an understandable bout of denial, Sanderson relented and decided to let the voices in — and all of us are far better off because she did.

Readers of THE RELUCTANT MESSENGER will travel along with Sanderson on a remarkable journey that unfolds like the proverbial lotus flower. This first downloads of information are interesting enough, but perhaps not so unlike much of  New Age pronouncements already out there. (There’s no shortage of books today based on channeled information, not to mention perhaps thousands of YouTube videos. In fact, this is a phenomenon literally centuries old).

Candice M. Sanderson

But as Sanderson grows into her practice and becomes ever more accepting of the remarkable experiences, she  learns to tune in her “frequency” with greater skill. What she she brings out thereafter just gets more amazing page after page.

I’ve read dozens if not hundreds of book written by channelers. For me, what makes Candice Sanderson’s book different is twofold.

First, she’s simply an excellent writer. Her prose flows effortlessly. She crafts easy sentences that are lean, concise, punchy and on target.  Words stream into sentences, sentences meld into paragraphs making for pages that glide down a path of least resistance. Better yet, despite the lofty nature of her subject matter, Sanderson never comes off as pretentious nor devolves into smarmy sentimentality. The result imparts a grounded sense of authenticity despite the mind-blowing information offered.

In fact, I found a certain ironic humor in how so many of the major revelations coming at Sanderson are triggered by the act of getting into her car, snapping on her seatbelt and getting ready for her commute to work! Driving to work is usually a grim routine of low-grade stress for most people, but for this author, it sets the stage for visionary inspiration!

The other aspect that separates THE RELUCTANT MESSENGER from other channeled works is the array of sources and kinds of entities Sandersen communicates taps into. Readers will be regaled with wisdom from:

• Disincarnate entities
• Angelic beings
• Extraterrestrials
• Deceased people
• Native American demiurges
• Ascended Masters
• Christian divinities
• Buddhist mystical figures
• Cosmological physics perspectives

… and more. Don’t worry, I’m not giving too much away because, believe me, you’re going to want to hear what all of the above have to say. All off these powerful sources aren’t trotting across the stage of Sanderon’s mind merely to spew vague philosophies — they’re throwing down some real cosmogonic red meat you’ll all be chewing on for a long time to come.

Saint Teresa of Ávila, 1515-1582

At the risk of overstating things, I have to confess that a certain name kept pinging through my mind as I was reading through this document — Saint Teresa of Ávila — the visionary 14th Century Spanish saint, not so much to make a one-to-one comparison with Ms. Sanderson, but because so many of the themes of both are similar. Saint Teresa said: “It is love alone that gives worth to all things.” She also said that everything we experience in this physical world is “vanity” and but a shadow of the greater reality of “the divine.”

But — whether a legendary saint or any of today’s popular working channelers — I’m betting Candice Sanderson would say that every one of us has the same potential to open to our own latent inner numinous because, after all, as her sources reminded her many times: “We’re all One.”

ADDITIONAL NOTE: I recently read the story of another somewhat “reluctant channeler” — Betty White — the wife of early 20th Century writer Stewart Edward White. See my review of THE BETTY BOOK HERE published in 1937.

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Ken Korczak is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer, served as an advocate for homeless people as a VISTA Volunteer, and taught journalism at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: BIRD BRAIN GENIUS

All NEW: KEN’S BOOK REVIEW SITE ON FACEBOOK: REMOTE BOOK REVIEWING

Free Ebook About Channeling Ghosts and Spirits Is a Remarkable Window Into What Mediums Were Learning About The Afterlife 150 Years Ago

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Review by: KEN KORCZAK

Mediumship, spirit writings and the séance were becoming all the rage by the late 1860s and perhaps would peak in England and America around end of the 19th Century. After, say, 1910, the fascination with empirical science began to gain steam, and before long, science fiction magazines were emerging, displacing that sense of wonder one filled by the spiritualists and occultists.

But in 1869 a klatch of free-thinking transcendentalists gathered somewhere in America — and apparently they had access to one incredibly talented medium. The result is this remarkable document, “Strange Visitors.”

Download the free ebook here: STRANGE VISITORS

It’s a collection of “original papers” which are messages channeled from the dead, but not just any of the dearly departed. This ambitious project goes for the cream of the crop. They seek contact with luminaries from the world of science and literature, philosophy and government, art and poetry, and more.

Nathaniel Hawthorn

Such VIP Dead as Lord Byron, Nathaniel Hawthorn, Napoleon Bonaparte, Edgar Allen Poe and William Thackeray are contacted and queried for their impressions of what it is like to die and what the `The Other Side’ is like.

Also, people who were famous at the time, but more or less forgotten today, are tapped for after-death reports.

Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington

For example, there is a session with LADY BLESSINGTON, who was born to poverty in late 18th Century Ireland as Margaret Power. She suffered through a bad marriage to a drunken sea captain (which ended with his death in debtor’s prison), until she finally married into the aristocracy, landing Charles Gardiner, the 1st Earl of Blessington. Upon her elevation into high society, Lady Blessington became Countess Blessington and something of a celebrated literary figure across Europe and among elite, over-educated Americans.

But who is Henry J. Horn, the editor of this document?

I’ve done considerable sleuthing, and the best candidate might be a lawyer who spent most of his life here in my native Minnesota. Today, the “Horn House” at 50 Irvine Park in St. Paul is a prominent landmark listed with the Minnesota Historical Society. Born in Philadelphia in 1821, Henry J. Horn passed the bar in Pennsylvania and moved to the Twin Cities area in 1855. He purchased the Horn House in 1881. The home was built by Dr. Jacob Stewart in 1874 and designed by the German-American architect August Gauger. Henry J. Horn died in 1902.

Unfortunately, I have been unable to find any connection between Mr. Horn and spiritualist groups, mediums and séances — but is it likely that a high-profile, respected Minnesota attorney would lend his name to such an arcane publication? It’s a mystery.

An even bigger mystery is the identity of the medium himself/herself. Who was this remarkable person who contacted these disincarnate souls, and via “automatic writing,” produced reports an array of richly divergent writings (and poetry)from beyond the veil?

Charlotte Brontë

What’s even more amazing is that these manuscripts are much more than musings about the Afterlife — for example, an entire Gothic novel is presented, purportedly written by the ghost of Charlotte Brontë herself!

There are also political ravings by Napoleon — clearly still a megalomaniac-imperialist in the hereafter. A dirge by Edgar Allen Poe reveals that he remains a bleak, dreary, haunted poet despite having cast off the agony of the flesh!

The examples of Napoleon, Brontë and Poe might lead one to believe that these missives are not so much after-death communications, but rather, impressions of a creative medium with a literary bent — except that the majority of these works read like “authentic” contact with the dead.

Here’s what I mean:

In recent decades an interest in mediumship has experienced a resurgence. It all goes hand-in-hand with the rise of all things “New Age,” but interest in the idea that “no one truly dies” has also received a boost from medical types, such as Dr. Raymond Moody and his groundbreaking book LIFE AFTER LIFE and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross with ON DEATH AND DYING.

Others have since have gone much further with talking-to-the-dead kinds of books — consider the likes of psychologist Michael Newton and psychiatrist Brian Weiss who use hypnotic regression to document volumes of intense information from people’s past lives, but also from deceased loved ones.

Then there’s a whole string of folks from all walks of like who are either channeling the dead or reporting intense experiences in the Afterlife — books I’ve read recently (some reviewed here) along these lines include those by Natalie Sudman, Erika Hayasaki, Julia Assante, Dr. Eben Alexander, Dr. Allan Botkin, Bill Guggenheim, Dr. Don Miguel Ruiz, and many more —

— and the point is, the descriptions and communications these folks report about the after-death environment are remarkably similar the writings presented in “Strange Visitors” — which suggests that there is a certain authenticity to these works.

So this obscure gem published in 1869 is of great significance and interest.

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Ken Korczak is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer, served as an advocate for homeless people as a VISTA Volunteer, and taught journalism at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: BIRD BRAIN GENIUS

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Nancy Tremaine’s Story of Alien Contact With Reptilian Beings Is Relentlessly Weird But Is Also A Tale Of Courage And Hope That Deserves Serious Consideration

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Review by: KEN KORCZAK

The late journalist Jim Marrs, who wrote bestselling books about UFOs and sundry conspiracy theories, described something he called the “mental boggle point.”

That’s the point when even the most open-minded people confront information that is so unbelievable that the mind succumbs to a “rubber band effect,” snapping back to beliefs that are more comfortable and socially acceptable.

I wager that some of the even most enthusiastic supporters of the reality of UFOs, aliens and the like will reach their mental boggle point when reading the story of NANCY TREMAINE. If her experiences are true, then our reality is far, far stranger than most of us have ever dared imagine, and the implications of the UFO and alien contactee phenomenon are shattering.

In SYMBIOSIS, Tremaine documents a lifetime of UFO contact since age 12. She grew up in Novi, Michigan, a small town close by the outskirts of Detroit. Early one evening in 1961 she and her girlfriend Cindy, also 12, were stunned when a flying saucer appeared suddenly over their residential neighborhood. The object was “bigger than a house” and hovered close.

Nancy Tremaine

Cindy’s father was also a witness on the scene. It was not yet dark. The object was observed by many others in the neighborhood, including at least three police officers. At one point, the UFO sent down a light beam that zapped an unmarked police car and stopped it cold.The officers radioed the sighting back to their Chief of Police, Lee BeGole — who today in his 90s still remembers the report from his men.

Tremaine and her young friend were abducted into the craft. The aliens performed a number of highly intrusive physical examinations upon Nancy. Cindy was merely locked up in a “tube” positioned above from where she observed the aliens working over her friend. It seemed that the aliens had particular interest in Nancy, but not so much Cindy.

The two girls were let go after an indeterminate amount of time. A period of missing time then occurred. The next thing Nancy knew, she was back in her home where her obviously disturbed father was doing his best to reassure her she that was safe.  He told his shaken daughter that what had just happened was to never be spoken of again — not even a secret whisper to a friend — period.

And so, Neither Nancy Tremaine and Cindy maintained utter silence about the event for 50 years. The two women could not even bring themselves talk to each about it despite the fact that they shared an astounding incident that deconstructed all sense of normalcy. It changed their world view. The event may have contributed to Cindy’s future as a lifetime alcoholic.

Nancy had no memory of what had happened to her inside the craft. She only recalled standing in the street observing the fantastic object in the sky and the stunned, fearful reactions of Cindy and the police officers. The next thing she knew, she was home. But some deeper undercurrent haunted her for the next five decades.

Nancy suffered from classic symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. Much about her life was dysfunctional. She married and divorced four times. She suffered mysterious panic attacks. Her sexual experiences were often disturbing and her libido sometimes went into hyperdrive. She experienced odd blips of missing time and inexplicable anxieties. She had a pervasive sense of being alone in the world — as if she were in a strange place where she did not belong.

It was not until 2011 that Tremaine finally underwent hypnotic regression to find out what happened on that day so long ago. The sessions revealed a lifetime of fantastically freakish events retrieved from her memory. What she had to say under hypnosis was extraordinary and weird.

The most sensational claim, of course, it that Nancy Tremaine says she met an an alien back in 1961 of a type known in UFO circles as a “reptilian,” a kind of humanoid lizard being.

Furthermore, Tremaine says she has since developed a deeply loving relationship with a particular reptilian whom she has dubbed “Mr.” (that’s Mr. with a period). Tremaine says that she has been impregnated by Mr. and bore  him a son whom she calls Drax. Drax is actually a three-way hybrid resulting  from a combination of Nancy, her human lover, Sid, and the reptilian Mr. (Sid is not the real name of her boyfriend. She said Sid stands for “Some Guy I dated.”)

Has your mind reached the mental boggle point yet? Well, hold on. There’s more.

Not only did Nancy Tremaine give birth to a human-reptilian hybrid alien child, she did so at the age of 62! Yes, she has a picture of her swollen, pregnant belly which she shows us in this book. But she didn’t give birth naturally to this baby — it was simply taken from her one night by the aliens. One day her stomach was showing, the next day it was flat.

She also has pictures of an odd set of round footprints in the snow that lead up to her house and appear to enter right into her doorway. Tremaine said these are tracks left by Drax when he came to visit her one night.

Okay, I’m probably revealing too much information here, but I promise those who want to read Tremaine’s book there is plenty more information to challenge your mind and world view.

David Icke

Now — those who are already  schooled in UFO lore are probably familiar with what has become a well-defined sub-genre of ufology which is the suggested existence of a class of aliens known as the reptilians. For better or worse, reptilians are probably most associated today with the prominent, prolific and vociferous conspiracy theorist, DAVID ICKE.

Icke is a British citizen who has written numerous books postulating a variety of conspiracy-driven scenarios.  One is that our planet has been visited by an interdimensional race of reptilian beings for thousands of years. Icke says the reptilians have mastered shape-shifting and can appear as humans that are undetectable from real humans. They possess extremely advanced holographic technology that makes them masters of illusion on many levels. Icke says the reptilians have infiltrated world governments, banks, corporation and our society in general and are meddling in human affairs on all levels.

But many others report the existence of reptilians as well. In fact, thousands of experiencers and contactees tell of seeing or interacting with reptilian beings. Others contend that their existence is hinted at in the Bible. The snake who tempted Adam and Eve, for example, is a metaphor for the interference of reptilian in the affairs of humankind. Other religions also feature snake or reptile motifs in various godlike roles interacting with mankind.

Curiously and intriguingly, reptilians also pop up in other modes of altered-consciousness explorations. One of the most striking are the DMT experiments of DR. RICK STRASSMAN. DMT is a powerful hallucinogenic compound that is produced naturally in the human brain’s pineal gland in microscopic amounts. DMT is sometimes called “the Spirit Molecule.” In medically approved and legally sanctioned studies, Dr. Strassman injected some 400 volunteers with DMT. These subjects described the powerful psychedelic and psychotropic effects they experienced — some of which included not only interaction with reptilian beings, but sex with reptilians, or experiences of being raped by reptilians.

Encounters with reptilians have been reported by those partaking in ayahuasca ceremonies under the guidance of shamans in the rainforest regions of South America. Ayahuasca is a powerful natural hallucinogenic compound made from the banisteriopsis vine combined with another plant, usually the shrub psychotria viridis. The combination contains monoamine oxidase inhibitors and the psychotropic compound dimethyltryptamine. Interactions, good and bad, with reptilian figures under the influence of ayahuasca are commonplace, and these date back to ancient times as reported by indigenous rainforest dwellers.

Reptilians entities have even been glimpsed or perceived by REMOTE VIEWERS, including perhaps the greatest of all the U.S. Military remote viewers, JOE MCMONEAGLE.

Perhaps one of the foremost experts on reptilians today is JOHN RHODES who heads up the website reptoids.com. Mr. Rhodes has done in-depth research into all aspects of the reptilian phenomenon. He prefers the term “reptoids” which he says is a more accurate description for who and what these beings truly are. His most fundamental claim is that reptoid are not aliens or interdimensional beings but a species native to our own planet earth. They evolved here, Rhodes says, and they live in a vast realm they maintain in the interior of the planet. You can view an excellent lecture by Rhodes on everything he has learned about reptoids here: JOHN RHODES: MUFON LECTURE.

Reptilian statues at Horiuji Temple, Japan, from about 600 A.D.

I’ll make only brief mention of an entirely other angle to the reptilian issue, and that involves the idea of mythical archetypes. Some scholars have made the suggestion that snake or reptilian themes are fundamental to the human psyche — some would even trace it to the limbic system of the human brain, which is also called our internal “Lizard Brain” — and so when people enter into altered states of consciousness (including hypnosis) the reptilian archetype can be triggered and brought to the forefront of human experience in a vivid and meaningful way. But all this is a deep subject far beyond the scope of this review.

The point is, Nancy Tremaine’s story may be bizarre and seem unbelievably fantastic, but she is hardly alone concerning the deep relationship she believes she has developed with a reptilian entity. It’s a worldwide phenomenon that exists across cultures in all parts of the globe and has been manifesting in human experience since the beginning of time.

Figurine of ancient Vinča Culture of Serbia features many reptoid-like statues. Dated to 5700 B.C.

Simple-minded skeptics will find as easy mark in Ms.Tremaine. No doubt they will pounce on her revelation that she was sexually molested as a youth. Indeed, much about her entire life story is shot through with the painful sexual abuse experiences she suffered personally and within her family. Her own daughter was sexually molested. She speaks of a certain uncle who apparently was a serial molester — a man who got his hands on numerous members of Tremaine’s extended family. Everyone knew it, but no one did anything about it, she said.

An entire body of skeptical belief exists that seeks to explain away all alien abduction phenomenon as rooted in the trauma of sexual molestation. The basic theory is that victims of molestation grasp at a false alien abduction fantasy as a way to repress or distance themselves from what really happened to them. They re-frame the painful experience in a way that is less shameful and personal, and as a way to deal with guilt, and so forth.

Of course, skeptics will also gleeful discredit anything Tremaine says because they reject utterly the efficacy of any information obtained by way of hypnotic regression. Skeptics maintain that this form of memory retrieval is 100% unreliable because it readily encourages elaborate, creative imaginings by the subjects. They also claim a hypnotist has a tendency to “lead the witness” with either overt or subconscious suggestion.

Geneticist J.B.S. Haldane

But these same skeptics have a major problem in the case of Nancy Tremaine — it’s the fact that the genesis of her lifetime of contactee experience was a UFO event that has been corroborated by multiple witnesses. Her story that is supported by the highly respected former Novi, Michigan, Chief of Police Lee BeGole who has street named after him. Her friend Cindy is on record with both seeing the UFO in 1961 and being aboard the craft where she was ensconced in a tube. Other witnesses have come forward as well.

Granted, merely observing a UFO does not equal a lifetime of interaction, having sexual relationships with and breeding a hybrid child with a reptilian being — but it does add considerable weight to her narrative. And Nancy Tremaine offers a body of other circumstantial evidence to support the reality of her story.

I say — just read the book. Don’t judge it by its cover art or dismiss because its outlandish premise triggers your “mental boggle point.”. Nancy Tremaine deserves to be heard. Her story is worthy of being considered and taken seriously. Remember the words of British geneticist and evolutionary biologist J.B. S. Haldane who said:

“My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we CAN suppose.”


NOTE: Please see my reviews of other UFO books by clicking on the following links:

EXTRATERRESTRIAL ODYSSEY by Rocky Kvande

MANAGING MAGIC by Grant Cameron

HOW TO TALK TO AN ALIEN By Nancy DuTertre

ALIENS IN THE FOREST by Noe Torres and Ruben Uriarte

SEARCHERS by Ron Felber

Follow @KenKorczak



Ken Korczak is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer, served as an advocate for homeless people as a VISTA Volunteer, and taught journalism at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: BIRD BRAIN GENIUS

All NEW: KEN’S BOOK REVIEW SITE ON FACEBOOK: REMOTE BOOK REVIEWING

Reclusive UFO Abductee Calvin Parker Breaks Silence With Book On Iconic UFO Abduction Event At Pascagoula, Mississippi, In 1973: An Important Breakthrough For Ufology

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Review by: KEN KORCZAK

I was 14 years old in 1973. My family subscribed to two daily newspapers — the Minneapolis Tribune (now the StarTribune) and a North Dakota-based paper, the Grand Forks Herald. I was already a news junky and read them both every day.

In about mid-October of that year both papers carried a sensational story about two Mississippi men who were abducted by robot-like aliens with crab-like claws and wrinkled, leathery skin. The men were “floated” into an oval-shaped UFO, subjected to an examination and released after about 30 minutes.

The newspaper stories were accompanied by intriguing pen-and-ink drawings of the bizarre alien creatures and also a sketch of a blue-glowing UFO.

Even as a teenager, I was profoundly struck by the fact that such an amazing account was presented in two mainstream newspapers. It gave the story an added jolt of legitimacy to my young mind. Now 45 years later, that feeling remains.

Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker in 1973.

Normally sensational stories like this appeared only in the National Enquirer or FATE or UFO magazines, but the Pascagoula incident was a case that somehow transcended standard divisions of journalism. It’s almost as if the event carried with it an intuitive sense that something real must have happened. The story circled the globe in top-tier newspapers and broadcast media around the world.

One of the many sketches of the “alien robots” that grabbed the two men and floated them into a UFO.

It’s just one of the reasons that the Pascagoula abduction has always remained among the most vexing and iconic UFO incidents of all time. Furthermore, skeptics, including guys like Philip Klass and Joe Nickell, threw everything they could at the story of the two abductees, Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker. But the pushback of the knee-jerk naysayers seemed to ring hollow and fall flat. A sense of strained desperation characterized debunking attempts.

Another fascinating aspect of the case was the difference in the way the two men subsequently dealt with what has happened to them. The older man, Charles Hickson, a Korean War combat veteran, shipyard foreman and solid southern working man, spent the rest of his life talking about it, granting hundreds of media interviews, writing a book and even occasionally hitting the lecture tour.

But young shipyard welder Calvin Parker, just 19 at the time, wanted none of it. He suffered a nervous breakdown a week after the abduction and essentially went into hiding thereafter. The general impression has been that Parker sent himself into a kind of self-imposed witness protection program. This created an aura of mystery about Parker which has ever since bolstered the “high strangeness” mystique and legacy of the Pascagoula UFO abduction event.

So when I heard a few months ago that Calvin Parker had not only resurfaced but was coming out with a book to tell his side of the story — after all these decades! — my anticipation meter redlined! What would he have to say? And better yet, would he reveal new details about one of the greatest UFO cases off all time?

Artists impression of Pascagoula UFO.

Well, after reading Calvin Parker’s PASCAGOULA: THE CLOSEST ENCOUNTER I am not disappointed. Despite some agonizing drawbacks to this book (which I’ll discuss in a bit) — this direct witness/abductee account provides enough additional information to make it one of the most important contributions to ufology in recent years.

I say that because, other than the enduring influence of the Pascagoula event, this case essentially went cold more than 40 years ago. Unlike other famous incidents, such as Roswell or England’s Rendlesham Forest encounters, where new clues and evidence have continued to trickle out over the years, Pascagoula was essentially a “one and done” happening that presented little opportunity for further investigation.

Hickson on site of the event, 1973.

But Calvin Parker’s book has changed that. For one thing, it provides the testimony of several local residents who were in proximity to the area where the abduction event took place. They offer credible, objective accounts of having seen a UFO like the one described by Hickson and Parker in the area in a time frame before and after the event.

But the bombshell of this book for me is the revelation that Calvin Parker underwent 90 minutes of hypnotic regression with none other than the famous ufologist BUDD HOPKINS in 1993, twenty years after the event. Parker never received a copy of the tape Hopkins made of the session. Worse, Hopkins died in 2011. The fate of the Parker regression tape seemed that it was lost.

Dr. David Jacobs

But now thanks to the dogged work of long-time British UFO investigator Philip Mantle, the tape was found and its transcript is presented in full in this book. The way the tape was found is an interesting anecdote in itself — it turns out is was in the possession of another venerable ufologist, Dr. David Jacobs. After Hopkins’ death, Jacobs was entrusted with Hopkins’ documents and materials. He agreed to provide the tape for this book.

Scottish writer David Lindsay

The transcript itself reads like a surrealist masterpiece. It’s almost like something concocted from the mind of DAVID LINDSAY while retaining the flavor of an honest southern man who spent his life working with his hands, living in small towns and leading a simple life.

The hypnotic regression suggested that much more occurred either during the original Pascagoula event itself — but more likely through a series of alien visitations upon Calvin Parker from the time he was six years old and throughout his life. Furthermore, the narrative of the transcript includes unsettling, shifting focuses in time, brutal and violent interactions with alien beings and jarring vignettes featuring random bits of imagery that add mystery and drama.

I’ll say no more and let readers discover the rest for themselves.

British ufologist Philip Mantle

Before I get on with some final business I think it’s important to recognize veteran British UFO researcher PHILIP MANTLE for the role he played in breathing new life into the Pascagoula UFO incident. It was Mr. Mantle who approached Calvin Parker and urged him to write this book. Mantle also published it under his FLYING DISK PRESS stamp.

I should not be be underestimated what a major coup this represents to the world of ufology — and Philip Mantle is the guy who pulled it off. Mantle has been one of the U.K. longest and most irrepressible UFO investigators for decades. It required someone with his connections and skills (such as tracking down the Hopkins tape) to provide Parker with the encouragement, morale boost and platform to break open an exemplar of classic ufology. (NOTE: See my review of Philip Mantle’s novel: ONCE UPON A MISSING TIME).

Now a bit of pain: It truly grieves me to say that the editing of this book is awful, both in terms of the way certain content choices were made in presenting certain blocks of information as well as in respect to run-of-the-mill typos, punctuation errors and spelling.

Charles Hickson published his own version of the Pascagoula abduction event in 1978.

I almost never play “Grammar Police” in my reviews even when it is warranted, but in this case we have a book that could and should take its place as a classic among the shelves of the best UFO literature — but the lack of proper editing mars the overall effort.

I was thrilled that the editors did a superb job in retaining the sound and cadence of Calvin Parker’s deep-southern Mississippi drawl — but to then sprinkle it with British spellings for words like humor (humour) and center (centre) jar on the ear like potholes in an otherwise well-paved road.

Another major problem: In the Hopkins transcript portion, some lines are often miscued as “BUDD” when “CALVIN” is actually speaking and vice-versa — such a snafu is inexcusable for a document of such importance and relevance.

But to end on a positive note, this book includes a lot of excellent photos and illustrations. I was especially delighted to see updated photos of Calvin Parker as he is today.

I was thrilled and gratified to finally read Calvin Parker’s story after all these years. It returned to me that feeling of wonderment I experienced as a 14-year-old so many years ago growing up in a small town in northern Minnesota, where I spent every clear night out in the backyard with my 6-inch Newtonian reflector observing the stars and pondering: “Who might be out there?”


Please see my reviews of other UFO books by clicking on the following links:

MANAGING MAGIC by Grant Cameron

EXTRATERRESTRIAL ODYSSEY by Rocky Kvande

LOST ON SKINWALKER RANCY by Erick T. Rhetts

THE CIRCLE AND THE SWORD by Nigel Mortimer

Follow @KenKorczak



Ken Korczak is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer, served as an advocate for homeless people as a VISTA Volunteer, and taught journalism at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: BIRD BRAIN GENIUS

All NEW: KEN’S BOOK REVIEW SITE ON FACEBOOK: REMOTE BOOK REVIEWING

The Betty Book is a Masterpiece of “Spirit Writing” Literature Channeled by Betty White With Help From Her Famous Author Husband Stewart Edward White

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Review by: KEN KORCZAK

Stewart Edward White was a popular author in his day. From about 1900 through the early 1920s he published some three dozen books, both fiction and nonfiction, and they sold well.

His first book, The Westerners, was made into a Hollywood movie. Eight of his books would get movie treatment. The majority of his work featured outdoors themes that explored America’s “vanishing wilderness.” He wrote about his personal adventures with camping, cabin-building, panning for gold, hunting, fishing canoeing, Alaskan adventures and hiking deep outback trails.

His writing made him the first to be awarded the rare designation of Honorary Scout by the Boy Scouts of America in 1927, a recognition also given to the likes of Charles Lindbergh and James L. Clark. He hobnobbed with such luminaries as former President Teddy Roosevelt. Many of his works were later adapted into TV shows for The Wonderful World of Disney.

It was in 1919 that his life took a strange detour.

Stewart and his wife were at a party where someone suggested they noodle around with an Ouija board, “just for laughs.” Stewart describes himself as a skeptic, but more so, just basically unfamiliar and uninterested with occult phenomenon and esoteric thought. His overall notion was that psychic phenomenon had “been disproven.”

A Ouija board for sale in 1919.

His party friends disliked the planchette normally used with an Ouija board so they substituted an overturned whiskey glass. No one was in a serious mood so they asked goofy, inane questions. They hooted with laughter and scoffed with derision as the Ouija board only seemed to be obliging them by spelling out absurd and simplistic responses.

At one point, however, the Ouija expressed frustrations with the party folks. It abruptly spelled out: “Why do you ask such foolish questions?” This intrigued Stewart White.

But there was another thing that caused Mr.White to become even more intrigued — it was the way that shot glass moved under his fingers. He was aware of the scientific theory that such movement was caused by involuntary motions of the hands driven by cues from the subconscious mind — what today is called the ideomotor effect — and yet, he had a nagging sense this wasn’t what was happening. He couldn’t shake the feeling that “some other force” was involved.

One other thing gave him pause. At one point, the Ouija started spelling out the name “Betty” over and over again. Betty happened to be Stewart’s wife. She was standing off to the side no longer paying attention to the party game. Her husband told her the Ouija was requesting her participation. Betty shrugged her shoulders and obliged. She sat down and put her finger on the shot glass. The Ouija then began spelling out over and over again: “Get a pencil … get a pencil … get a pencil.”

The small peculiarities of the Ouija party captivated Betty just enough to pick up a pencil a few days later. Yes … despite having little or no interest in the occult or spiritualism … she decided to go ahead and try her hand at automatic writing!

A rare photo of Betty White along with her husband Stewart Edward White.

Automatic writing is when someone writes down information without conscious intent. The hand seems to move on its own as it spells out words. The paranormal suggestion is that the writer has set his or her mind aside and is channeling information from an unseen agent, such as a spirit or nonhuman entity of some sort.

Those who lean skeptical say it is information percolating up from the subconscious, or basically the same ideomotor effect that drives the Ouija. There is no outside influence. This information is coming strictly from inside the brain of the writer — who is also probably just deluding him or herself, the skeptics say.

As for Betty White, she just put all theories aside. Neither she nor her husband proclaimed to have an agenda, no investment in any particular theory, philosophy or occult influence — and for some extraordinary reason — Betty began the fantastically tedious process of trying to make headway with automatic writing!

This was remarkable — because this effort can be elusive and banal in the extreme. And for what reward, exactly? It involves endless hours of sitting with a pencil poised over a sheet of paper and getting into a certain frame of mind — a state that would allow her hand to flow, to seemingly write stuff down as if the her hand had a mind of its own.

A 19th Century depiction of automatic writing.

I dare say 99 out of a 100 people … no, more like 999 out of a 1,000 people … who give this a try once or twice give up in abject frustration. But Betty persisted. She was able to generate just a few words and phrases at first. Later came more complete sentences. The information imparted by these phrases and sentences was just intriguing enough for Betty to soldier on. The interest, support and participation of her husband was certainly helpful.

Betty eventually reached the point where she could generate pages of material via automatic writing. She then graduated to what today we could call “channeling.” She sat back in a mild trance state and dictated by voice information coming directly into her mind while her husband wrote it all down.

But just with who or what was Betty communicating? Ghosts? The spirits of dead people? Some sort of super-intelligent disincarnate intelligence? It seemed to be the latter. It was through a suggestion of a friend that Betty and Stewart decided to call their unseen source “The Invisibles.”

That’s not what the nonphysical entities called themselves. Indeed, these beings who were so eager to speak through Betty were also highly reluctant to talk about themselves. The details about their own true nature would be “an unnecessary distraction,” they said. The information they wanted to impart to the human race was paramount.

Stewart Edward White

The Invisibles insisted that what they wanted to tell humanity was not just urgent, but “extremely urgent.” They said humankind had become lost is a miasma of trivial thoughts and petty pursuits They said that “thoughts are things,” and therefore, bad thoughts, negative thoughts and useless thoughts were doing great damage to the human condition.

They told Betty and Stewart that the dominant philosophy of materialism — that people were mere physical matter interacting with a purely physical world — was a dead end. They said humanity had become cut off from “a larger truth and reality” about their individual and collective existence — which they said extends far beyond the borders of the physical body.

They said the human brain was not merely a lump of meat acting and reacting to stimulus from the material world. The suggestion was that we had become convinced that we are mere biological machines, and that our reality ended at the border demarcated by the outline of our skin.

The Invisibles then imparted a vision of each human being as a much vaster entity composed of a nonphysical component that was just as real as the physical body. Although the Invisibles, Betty and Stewart all disliked loaded terms such as “spirit” or “soul” because of the religious baggage attached to these definitions, they nevertheless used them for the sake of convenience.

The Invisibles stressed the idea that a person’s “soul” was also a bona fide “thing with actual physical substance.” About this, Stewart  White asked them:

“I may be literal-minded. But I am going to ask whether this spiritual body as you describe it is a symbolic statement meant to convey a concept or whether you mean it literally as you describe it, as a material thing.”

The Invisibles answered:

“It is ACTUALLY MATERIALLY THAT in its own condition of health and development. It is flesh and it is blood.It may not be the same kind, but it is as real, as warm, as living as your own.”

At this point Betty paused to actually experience directly what the soul or spiritual body was like. After about a half hour, she offered:

“It is a pulsing, living body purified of organic frailty … durable, flexible, susceptible of more powerful action through susceptibility of sense.”

And so the majority of the information offered in The Betty Book is a kind of instruction manual for how human beings can expand their vision and understanding of themselves and get into greater touch with what is actually the larger aspect of who we are. Think of the physical body as the tip of the iceberg that peaks above the surface of the water — and the nonphysical or “spiritual aspect” as the greater, more significant and more important component of each individual person.

Tina Keller M.D., a pioneer of Jungian analysis.

The kind of information and instruction offered by The Invisibles through Betty is some of the most remarkable channeled material I have ever read. Every page is deeply substantive and intellectually challenging — this is anything but more of the same New Age pap offered since, say, the 1960s, when a resurgence of channeled writings began to re-emerge  into popular circulation on our bookshelves.

Even the great Swiss psychologist Carl Jung was deeply impressed by The Betty Book. Shortly after The Betty Book was published Jung gave a copy to his long-time associate Dr. Tina Keller, a pioneer in psychiatric medicine and psychoanalysis. Keller said she read an re-read The Betty Book and all of the subsequent channeled books that followed it. Keller said:

“Betty White, the brilliant woman who had accidentally discovered her mediumistic gifts, dictated to her husband, the writer and explorer Stewart Edward White, a long series of teachings, full of wisdom and salty humor, for practical application of living. They were communicated by different personalities of quasi-personalities whom the Whites called “The Invisibles” …. My own experiments, based on the books, proved this to be both true and extremely important.”

The late Jane Roberts and “Seth”. Roberts channeled the disincarnate entity to write dozens of books.

As for myself, I can think of no greater compliment to make about The Betty Book than it offers channeled information on par with the work of the great Jane Roberts, author of the Seth books. Roberts is the gold standard for intelligent and authentic channeled material, in my opinion.

Betty White’s information is far superior to, say, the healing advice and Atlantis predictions of Edgar Cayce, or the largely bland and vague pronouncements we get from so many of the popular psychic mediums selling books today.

There’s some additional information in the appendix that is fascinating. Stewart and Betty get together with some like-minded friends and conduct a series of experiments in which The Invisibles bring forth a variety of physical phenomenon to demonstrate their reality. This includes producing visible auras around the bodies of the participants. The Invisibles also conjured a series of “masks” which appeared over the face of Betty causing her to look like her child self. Other masks gave her more bizarre, exaggerated caricatures.

After the success of The Betty Book, Betty and Stewart produced several more volumes derived from Betty’s mediumship, the most successful of which was THE UNOBSTRUCTED UNIVERSE released in 1940. This book sold so rapidly that the printers had difficulty keeping up with month-to-month demand.


I think it’s significant to note that the financial success of all the channeled Betty books was no big deal to Stewart and Betty White. They were fantastically rich and had been so from birth. Both were the children of multi-millionaires. Betty was from one of the most venerable aristocratic families of Rhode Island. Stewart’s grandfather and father made millions in the lumber business. Stewart and Betty lived an exciting lifestyle of globe trotting, yachting and exotic adventure. That means the old skeptic’s charge of “they were just selling sensational books to make money” cannot apply.

It’s safe to say that Stewart Edward White, his books and the metaphysical books he produced with Betty are largely forgotten today. Some of them were reprinted as paperbacks with sensational titles and lurid images in the 1970s. They were sold in airports and drugstore racks designed as impulse buys for folks with casual interest in the paranormal.

Whatever the case, Betty White’s channeled information eloquently edited and assembled by her talented husband deserve a prominent place in the pantheon of the best metaphysical writings ever produced.

NOTE: You can read The Betty Book for free on the Australian Project Gutenberg site here:  THE BETTY BOOK FREE


ADDITIONAL NOTE: You may be interested in my reviews of similar books, just click the links below:

AFTERLIFE CONVERSATIONS WITH KEN KESEY (AND OTHERS) BY WILLIAM BEDIVERE

THE GHOST OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY BY FRANK DEMARCO

GHOSTS I HAVE SEEN AND OTHER PSYCHIC EXPERIENCES BY VIOLET TWEEDALE

A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS BY DAVID LINDSAY

APPLICATION OF IMPOSSIBLE THINGS BY NATALIE SUDMAN

Follow @KenKorczak



Ken Korczak is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer, served as an advocate for homeless people as a VISTA Volunteer, and taught journalism at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: BIRD BRAIN GENIUS

All NEW: KEN’S BOOK REVIEW SITE ON FACEBOOK: REMOTE BOOK REVIEWING

Veteran UFO Investigator Grant Cameron Makes His Case: U.S. Government Has Been Managing A Subtle, Controlled Disclosure Strategy For 70 Years

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Review by: KEN KORCZAK

Who is the most important person in ufology today?

Forget Steven Greer or Tom Delong or Stanton Friedman or Linda Moulton Howe or Richard Dolan or Leslie Kean or Steve Basset or Timothy Good or Luis Elizondo or Robert and Ryan Wood or Michael Salla — or even the now mostly silent Jacques Vallee.

The most significant figure in the study of UFO phenomenon today is this guy: GRANT CAMERON.

Cameron, a well-mannered Canadian from the Great Plains city of Winnipeg, has been doggedly seeking the truth about UFOs for 42 years. He was unwittingly thrust into this role after a personal encounter with the famous Charlie Red Star in 1975.

That was the name given to a blood-red, pulsating ball of light that amazed people dwelling in a series of small towns in southern Manitoba near the North Dakota border.

The Charlie Red Star UFO was captured in many photos as it cruised the countryside of southern Manitoba from 1975 to 1976.

For an incredible two years, Charlie Red Star haunted the skies of this sparsely-populated, wide-open prairie landscape dotted by small farming communities. The conservative, no-nonsense folks of the region could only gape in wonder at the bold aerial antics of the unfathomable object gamboling across their heavens.

Grant Cameron – who previously had zero interest in UFOs – suddenly knew that he would spend the rest of his life trying to find an answer: “What was that thing?”

Now, more than four decades later, he feels he has an answer. He sums up his conclusion with a single word: “Consciousness.”

Grant Cameron

More than anything else, the central most important aspect of the UFO phenomenon is the idea that Consciousness is primary and material reality is secondary. If you want to understand UFOs, you must start there, Cameron says.

Furthermore, if you stay mired in materialism – specifically, the paradigm of material, nuts-n-bolts science – your fate in the UFO field will be an agonizing entanglement in one bizarre rabbit hole after another – it might even drive you insane.

Cameron has avoided insanity, however, or even evolving into an eccentric UFO weirdo. He’s maintained a kind of grounded dignity. He has diligently sought answers while living gracefully with uncertainty and staying close to facts.

But that doesn’t mean he has rejected high strangeness out of hand. Cameron has since embraced a lot of way-out-there stuff, from the accepting the reality of ETs interacting with us daily to the existence of trans-dimensional portals that can punch us through to parallel worlds. (NOTE: See Cameron’s video documentation of Xendra Portals HERE

This book, MANAGING MAGIC, sticks to slightly more practical matters, however. A few years ago, Cameron said he was done with investigating UFOs. He concluded that chasing lights in the sky and sifting through endless classified government reports obtained through FOIA requests was fruitless.

Recent release of a U.S. Air Force F/A-18 fighter jet footage of a UFO exploded speculation that the government was about to reveal more of what it knows about UFOs

But just like Michael Corleone’s famous lament from Godfather III – “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in” – Cameron felt compelled to write another UFO book. That’s because of what he believes he now knows about the issue of Disclosure – official government disclosure to the public about the reality of UFOs.

A huge portion of the UFO community has been foaming at the mouth for decades, excoriating the government for withholding information from tax-paying citizens who have a right to know . In fact, ranting and raving about oppressive and corrupt government secrecy is an almost inseparable issue from the central premise of UFOs itself within ufology circles.

Government secrecy fosters delicious conspiracy theories and a self-righteous “feel-good” outlet for venting and blaming the powerful elite for the condescending way they treat the masses. The evil cabals at the highest levels of society have earned our virtuous rage of the sainted public.

Let’s face it – playing the victim is a guilty pleasure for many people — perhaps even when justified.

Cameron now believes, however, that our government has likely adopted the correct course all along – that course is an extremely gradual disclosure designed to drip-drip-drip out UFO information over a period of decades.

Doing it that way is for our own good, Cameron says. That’s because the actual truth behind the phenomenon is so bizarre, so enormous, so weird and so epistemologically shattering – a long, drawn-out disclosure is the only responsible thing to do. In the conclusion of Managing Magic he writes:

“After decades of work on the disclosure problem I have become much more sympathetic to the position the government has taken, and how they have handled the situation they were handed in the 1940s.

“Many in the UFO community will say that full disclosure should be a simple thing and done ASAP. The more I view the evidence, the less I agree with that position and the more I see a potential for disaster were that approach to be taken.”

He also states near the beginning of the book:

“The American government is taking the lead on this measured disclosure. When the facts get reviewed, this becomes very evident.”

This view is anathema to so many in ufology. Again, the endorphin rush they get from the righteous indignation they feel at the hands of a deceitful government is a fundamental aspect – in an ironic sort of way – of why people get enthralled by the UFO issue in the first place.

Rock star turned UFO investigator Tom DeLong.

Dr. Steven Greer.

Cameron offers a blunt assessment on some of the biggest names in ufology today – especially rock-star-turned-ufology-star TOM DELONG, former front man for the band Blink 182. Another is DR. STEVEN GREER the emergency-room-doctor-turned-self-proclaimed-greatest-ufologist-of-all-time.

Cameron points out what these two men have in common: They are both supreme ego maniacs. As such, they have been easily manipulated by government disinformation agents who are only happy to use them to leak both factual UFO information to the public – and disinformation when it suits the government strategy of a nuanced, subtle and gradual disclosure process.

That’s the crux of what Cameron is trying to tell us here. Our government, in fact, IS disclosing UFO information to us – but it is also misleading us with smoke screens when it wants to. The government is threading a delicate middle path between disclosure and disinformation – this middle way is designed to gradually acclimate the public over a period of many years – a necessary strategy to avoid catastrophic consequences.

But be warned: This is complicated.

Cameron’s thesis toils under the burden of that complication. I advise the reader to consider the information in this book with great care. The potential to misunderstand what Cameron is telling us is considerable. There are occasions in which the author would appear to contradict his own theories – but I believe that’s an artifact of the tangled labyrinth we necessarily must stumble through. The truth about UFOs is the the proverbial, “riddle, wrapped in a mystery, hidden inside an enigma.”

With Managing Magic, Grant Cameron makes a heroic effort to light a pathway through the most vexing labyrinth ever to confront mankind.


NOTE: SEE SOME OF THE OTHER UFO BOOKS KEN HAS REVIEWED ON THIS SITE:

EXTRATERRESTRIAL ODYSSEY By Roger Kvande

SELECTED BY EXTRATERRESTRIALS By Bill Tompkin

PASSPORT TO THE COSMOS By John Mack M.D.

LIGHT QUEST By Andrew Collins

SEARCHERS By Ron Felber



Ken Korczak is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer, served as an advocate for homeless people as a VISTA Volunteer, and taught journalism at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: BIRD BRAIN GENIUS

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The Restaurant On The Edge of Time: My Use of Lucid Dreams To Time Travel and Experience Wondrous Adevntures

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by: KEN KORCZAK

NOTE: This article appeared originally on my “old blog” in April of 2006 HERE. I re-post here with some slight editing to fix typos and sundry minor changes).

Many of us have a favorite restaurant where we love the food, the atmosphere, and the special feeling it gives us.

Today I bring you a story of one of my favorite restaurants — but I can only get to it through the process of lucid dreaming. A lucid dream is a dream in which you know you are dreaming. For several years, I experimented with advanced lucid dream inducement techniques, including using the NovaDreamer developed by THE LUCIDITY INSTITUTE founded by Stanford University psychologist STEPHEN LABERGE.

The NOVA Dreamer — A mask that can facilitate the lucid dreaming state sold by the Lucidity Institute.

The NOVADREAMER is a kind of “dream mask” which you wear over your eyes at as you asleep at night. It uses motion detectors to discern when you have entered the REM state — Rapid Eye Movement — which is an indication that you are dreaming.

Once REM is detected, the NovaDreamer signals you to “come awake” within your dream. The following story tells of a fantastic restaurant I discovered in the “dream world.” I call it: The Restaurant on the Edge of Time.”

One night as I was going to sleep I was very hungry, but I was too tired to get up for a snack.

After a few minutes — and after using my favorite lucid dream inducement technique – I found myself in an exhilarating dream in which I was flying through a high, craggy mountain pass. I instantly realized I was dreaming, and tried not to get too excited. I didn’t want to collapse the dream and wake up.


After a time of thrilling soaring through the mountains, there was a sudden “whump”! I found myself looking down at a vivid red carpet. Lifting my head, I found that I was in a bright room. I recognized it as some kind of large restaurant, furnished with heavy tables and chairs fashioned from oak timber, blackened with age. One entire side of the place, an entire wall, was a gigantic window — it was about 25 feet high. The room was like a big solarium.

Outside the window was a vast, snow-covered vista. Huge black-gray mountains with jagged, toothy peaks loomed in the mid-distance. In front of the mountains was a frozen glacial landscape, broken only here and there by a few gray rocky outcroppings. The sky was vibrant cerulean blue and blazing with cold sun.

It was a breath-taking sight. I stood where I had landed, gaping out the big window.

The “Goddess Waitress” — fan art graciously submitted by New Zealand artist Sanjana Baijnath http://www.sanjanasart.com/

Suddenly, I felt somebody touch my elbow. Startled, I whirled and saw a petite woman, about five feet tall, and of astounding beauty. She had luxurious chocolate-brown hair tumbling to her shoulders. Her skin was pale ivory, and she had stunning green eyes. Her lips were like red pillow cushions. She was the most profoundly lovely woman I had ever seen! Her radiant smile was competition for the luminous sunshine streaming through the giant window. She was achingly lovely!

I quickly became apparent this stunning person was a waitress. She said to me: “Do you want a table?” I stammered and said: “I guess so, but where am I?”

As I asked this question, the place began to shift and waver. I was starting to wake up — something I did not want to do yet! I wanted to experience this world!

But the woman helped me. She said: “Look down at the carpet and focus all your attention on it until things solidify for you.”

I obeyed, and looked down at the carpet. As I did so, I began to regain control of the dream. The carpet became solid; I could soon see every fiber in it. (I later learned this was the purpose of the carpet — it’s a special color designed to help people stay solid in the dream state)!

Anyway, once I was back in control, the beautiful waitress asked me how I got here. I said: “I think I’m dreaming, but I’m not sure. My physical body is on Earth, in a place called Minnesota. Do you know where that is?”

She laughed and said: “Yes, you are still on Earth, but you are probably in a different time period, and there is no Minnesota now.” And then she added: “But congratulations on making it here!

Then she led me to a table and asked me if I wanted something to eat. I said yes, but that I didn’t have any money. She burst out laughing. “You don’t need any money here! Feeding you will be an honor — you’ve earned it!”

I asked, “Why?”

She answered, “Because you’re here!”

I said: “Thank you. But I’m not sure if I can eat, or what I want.”

She winked at me, and said: “Don’t worry, I’ll bring you something you’re going to love.”

As she turned to go back toward the kitchen, I looked at her more. She was wearing a prim, earthy green knee-length frock. Her legs were smooth and muscular. Her feet were adorned with soft black ankle boots. She also evinced sweet scent, very subtle, like melted white sugar, or perhaps mild vanilla. Whew! She was so attractive it made me dizzy!

But I forced my mind off Eros. I looked around the restaurant a bit more. Perhaps six to eight other diners were present, speaking in low voices, minding their own business. Were they dreaming, too? They sipped drinks from crystal goblets, and ate from dark wooden bowls and wooden plates.

I was seated at a large oak table right next to the big windows. I looked out into the landscape and was surprised to see a human-like figure walking out on the glacial ice-pack. It was coming toward the restaurant, and as it got closer, I was flabbergasted by what I saw!

I realized that I was looking at not a human, but a proto-human! This “person” was some kind of Cro-Magnon man, or something. It stood tall and erect, but had a heavy, ape-like brow and face. It had thick, tangled black hair and beard. It was wearing animal furs, and high animal-fur boots or leggings. Strangely, it must have been 6’-8” or 6’-10” tall.


The proto-man was skinny, but tough-looking and sinewy with muscle. He was also carrying a variety of animal skin pouches. I had the impression that he might have been a shaman on a vision quest. In the dream state, thoughts like that just come to you; it’s kind of like ESP.

As the proto-man man came closer, I realized he could not see me through the window, or even see the restaurant. He stood there for a while, just kind of smelling the air. He seemed to sense that this was a magical place.

It began to dawn to me that this restaurant was probably designed to be a kind of viewing area, set up in the distant past, where “mind traveling” beings from the future could come to witness the ancient landscape while relaxing over a fine meal.

What a concept for a restaurant!

A was stunned and fascinated. I could not take my eyes off the proto-man. It was an eerie feeling to see a being that was perhaps only “somewhat” human.” He had the unmistakable mannerisms of a human, yet he was alien somehow — truly another species. I felt I could sense high intelligence in his face, a certain light in its eyes — as if he too was transcending to a higher level of understanding, just as those of us at the restaurant might be doing.

I made a mental connection.

Here I was at this restaurant, honing my own abilities to live and experience consciousness beyond my ordinary experience — striving to transcend my present level of existence — just as this proto-human was embarked upon a vision quest, striving to transcend his own level of development.

He eventually began to walk on, and slowly disappeared into the distance.

Presently, the lovely waitress returned with my food. She set down a wooden bowl filled with what looked like a delicious beef stew. It had small whole onions and tubers in it, and some other vegetables. She also set down a bowl of leafy salad, looking similar to spinach leaves. Finally, she presented a large, crystal glass containing a green drink of some kind, with ice in it.

She said: “You’re gonna love this. What you might want to try is spearing a chunk of meat, wrap it in one of these valor leaves and pop the whole thing into your mouth. The stew is quite spicy and the cool taste of the leaves balance the flavor.”

I said, “Okay,” and then, “I’ve never heard of ‘valor’ leaves. What are they?”

She said, “Just a kind of delicious plant we grow here.”

She left. I began to eat. I took her advice about wrapping a chunk of meat in the valor leaves. I popped a wrapped bit into my mouth — and the flavor exploded within! The meat had a pungent, hot-n-spicy tang — it was 100 percent succulent! — and the minty flavor of the valor leaves balanced it perfectly. It tasted so good I almost went into a trance!

I dug into the rest of the bowl and began to eat like a starved animal. It was so delicious I couldn’t shovel it all into my mouth fast enough! The whole onions were cooked to a perfect degree — just slightly crispy and full of flavor. The “mystery tubers” were sweet and savory.

As I was eating, I hardly noticed that the waitress had brought me a large husk of freshly baked bread, golden brown crust and fluffy white on the inside. I grabbed the bread and used it to sop up the gravy.

After I finished the bowl of stew, I reached for the glass of green liquid and took a tentative sip. It was a magnificent wine! It was like kiwi-fruit wine, except the sweetness was more perfect, the flavor more exotic. It gave my tongue just the right feeling. After a couple of sips, I poured the entire contents down my throat.

When the waitress came back and asked me how I liked it, I made a fool of myself, babbling about how superb everything was. I asked her what the stew was made of, and get ready for this — she said it was made from mammoth meat!

I had just eaten mammoth stew, and it was the best meal of my life!

She asked me if I wanted some desert. Of course, I said yes! A minute later she was back with what looked like a dry, crispy piece of toast, or a kind of large, squared cookie. It was waffle-yellow with bits of red in it. I took a bite — again my mouth erupted with delightful flavor! It had a sweet, banana-strawberry taste. Although it looked dry, it had the moist consistency of a strudel, or a fresh scone.

As I was eating this, I began to feel the solidity of the restaurant shimmer and waver. I tried looking at the red carpet again, but it wasn’t working. Darn! It was time to go, time to wake up.

As I faded, I saw the waitress-goddess smiling at me with a look of pure love — she seemed to be saying good-bye, and telling me to come again. I suddenly felt awful I had no way to leave her a generous tip!

I awoke. I got up out of bed and started whooping and hollering! I could not believe the marvelous journey I had just been on! My mind was wonder-swirling the rest of the night!

NOTE: I describe many more visits to The RET here in my blog in which I tell of my contacts with “Dr. 58” THE STRANGE UNIVERSE OF DR. 58