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.
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.”
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.
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.
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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