"Wonderfully Thought-Provoking"
December 17, 2009
The reviews of The Secrets of Dellschau: The Sonora Aero Club and the Airships of the 1800s, A True Story by Dennis Crenshaw in collaboration with P. G. Navarro are beginning to appear. “We love this book because it tells an utterly unique story which may well be related to the UFO mystery,” writes Jim Mosely in Saucer Smear. “Or, it may not.” What’s the book about? In a review of the book in Magonia Peter Rogerson writes: “When he died at the great age of 92 in 1923, Texas butcher Charles A. Dellschau left behind a secret and a mystery. These were a series of notebooks, filled with paintings of fantastic flying machines, which only came to light when his descendants had a clearout. By a process of serendipity they came to the attention of graphic designer and ufologist Peter Navarro. By decoding and translating writings in and around the pictures, Narvarro pieced together a tale of Dellschau’s involvemnt in a secret society of inventors living in gold-rush California. He created a vivid cast of over 60 characters, and a range of Heath Robinsonish flying machines, the Aeros…They were the work of this secret group, The Sonora Aero Club, and its even more shadowy backer the NYMZA.” Were these craft connected somehow to the well-known UFO flap of 1896-1897? Magonia ends its review with these words: “Whether the audience is ufologist or art appreciator, this broken old man is leading us back into the realms of pure childhood imagination.” Moseley, near the end of his review, says straight-out: “This is a wonderfully thought-provoking book…” And he kindly commends Anomalist Books “for their fortitude in publishing books of this kind.”