Independent researcher Annalisa Ventola reviews three more of our D. Scott Rogo books in the Summer 2007 issue of the Journal of Scientific Exploration. She begins with Miracles: A Parascientific Inquiry into Wondrous Phenomena, which provides a parapsychological interpretation of various phenomena recorded in religious traditions. She notes that although “miraculous phenomena are untidy and elude simple classification…Rogo rather enthusiastically gets up to his elbows in it. In the end, he suggests that the power of belief might be strong enough to create an independent spiritual reality for the culture that supports it.” Ventola finds the book “well-researched and thoughtfully written,” and notes that “it remains one of the few introductory books available on this topic.”

With The Search for Yesterday: A Critical Examination of the Evidence for Reincarnation, Ventola finds Rogo attempting “to shake researchers out of their ‘research grooves’” by questioning their very definition of reincarnation. While the work of the late Ian Stevenson has become synonymous with reincarnation research, “Rogo attempts to go beyond this research paradigm, introducing the public to a variety of approaches to the question of reincarnation, including hypnosis, regression, past-life therapy, and the past-life recall reported by researchers studying the properties of psychoactive drugs.” In doing so, the book, which uses “some unusual and unexpected sources,” promotes “a well-rounded examination of the evidence,” according to Ventola.

But she reserves some of her highest praise for Our Psychic Potentials, pointing out how it stands out from the “multitude of books and courses on the market purporting to enhance one’s psychic abilities.” While “Rogo’s strategies could very well form the basis for a formal self-training course in ESP,” Ventola calls the book “an ambitious work “ that “asks a lot of the solitary practitioner.” But when visitors to her Public Parapsychology blog ask how they can develop their own psychic abilities, “I have recommended this book to them. Unlike most other books on the subject, this book is devoid of the new age platitudes typically found in such discussions, and provides a very good introduction to the parapsychological literature, complete with references for further exploration.”

Ventola then tops off her review by admitting how she finds herself “infected by Rogo’s enthusiasm for the field of parapsychology and the promise of its findings. I admire how he communicated even the most arcane details of laboratory experiments in a cogent, yet personal manner. In doing so, he took on the underestimated role of public scholar, a role that parapsychologists have largely neglected in the 21st century.”

We are pleased to announce that we have returned into print two highly praised books previously published by EcceNova Editions, a Canadian publisher that closed its doors in December of 2006. The two books are part of a planned Fátima Trilogy authored by Joaquim Fernandes & Fina D’ Armada. The books have been translated from Portuguese by Eva M. Thompson and Alexandra Bruce, and edited by Andrew D. Basiago. Heavenly Lights: The Apparitions of Fátima and the UFO Phenomenon argues convincingly that the famed Fátima incident of 1917 did not involve “Marian apparitions,” as is commonly believed, but actually dealt with a series of close encounters with alien beings.

Celestial Secrets: The Hidden History of the Fátima Incident reveals the story of the “cover-up” by the Catholic church that has both shaped our modern view of the Fátima incident and obscured its true significance as the first major close encounter case of the 20th century. When they first appeared, both books were well-reviewed in Fortean Times by Bob Rickard, who called Heavenly Lights “priceless” and Celestial Secrets “an important archive.” The third volume in the trilogy — Fátima Revisited: The Apparition Phenomena in Myth, Religion, and Science — is due out at the end of the year and contains contributions by 20 Ufologists and academics.

In the Spring 2007 issue of Mysteries magazine, Michael Newton bemoans the fact that publishers let so many worthwhile books go out-of-print. “It is a pleasure, then, to mark the reappearance in a single volume of two classic investigative works from the 1970s, penned in concert by renowned Fortean authors Jerome Clark and Loren Coleman,” writes Newton in his review of The Unidentified & Creatures of the Outer Edge. “A new introduction to the omnibus edition explains that the authors have changed their minds (or, at least, their perspective) on certain subjects covered in these early volumes, but to their credit, they have left the original texts undisturbed and unredacted. They are willing to bear criticism and invite debate on subjects that are still as fresh, as mystifying, as when Clark and Coleman first set pens to paper in the Nixon years. Readers who missed these books first time around, including many who were yet unborn, now have a chance to savor ‘golden oldies’ in their pristine form.”

In the July 2007 issue of of Fortean Times, Bob Rickard gives The Universe Wants to Play, which is really volume 12 of The Anomalist journal, a rousing welcome back to print from its one-issue venture into the digital universe. “This edition,” he writes, “boasts 11 papers of the expected variety and excellence.” He describes each paper after slotting them into one of four general categories: fortean-related philosophy, social psychology, extrasensory perception in the sense of Fort’s “wild talents,” and the grey area between forteana and science. Rickard ends his review of this “touchy-feely/dead tree” issue with a few words of praise: “This is essential and quality reading for serious forteans.” Thank you, Bob!

UFO researcher and author Nick Refern has given Encounters at Indian Head a very thorough review over at UFO Mystic. He praises the book as “quite possibly the most significant published piece of work on the [Betty and Barney] Hill affair to date.” Redfern particularly likes the way this book was done: “This is the sort of book that I have wanted to see published for a long time: namely one that sees a group of Ufologists, researchers and writers get together, debate and discuss a controversial case, argue and defend their respective positions, and then try and reach some form of conclusion.” In sum, he finds the book to be “a good, solid, wide-ranging study of one of the most famous, talked-about and important UFO cases of all time. And while the book contains a variety of theories from an equal variety of observers, all seem unanimous in the idea that – whatever the truth of the Hill affair – its effect and influence upon Ufology and alien abduction research and reports has been enormous.” You can read the entire review here.

It may be the most important UFO book to appear in years. In a startling feat of historical research, Keith Chester’s new book, Strange Company: Military Encounters with UFOs in World War II, details an aspect of World War II that has been shrouded in ignorance for more than sixty years. Chester reveals that as the war gripped the world for six years, military personnel reported seeing numerous highly unconventional aircraft in all theaters of operation. These objects had extraordinary flight performance capabilities, came in a variety of shapes, sizes, and colors, and were able to travel at extraordinary speeds and avoid radar detection. The author recounts the reactions by military commands, their viewpoints, and theories as they struggled to make sense of the observations. A scientific panel convened by the CIA eight years after the war admitted that these unconventional objects were of unknown origin. “In this eye-opening, thoroughly researched book, bristling with surprising revelations,” writes UFO historian Jerome Clark in the foreword to the book, “Keith Chester challenges decades of conventional wisdom about the UFO phenomenon.” It’s time to drop the pretence that UFOs were a rare sight before 1947, when pilot Kenneth Arnold witnessed nine “flying saucers” over Washington State. While Arnold’s sighting is regarded by many as the beginning of the UFO phenomenon, Strange Company illustrates just how pervasive the phenomenon was years earlier–before, during, and after World War II. “What this work suggests,” says author Keith Chester, “is that while an immense twentieth century war was raging on Earth, someone, or something, from somewhere else, was watching us.”

Tony Healy, the co-author of The Yowie: In Search of Australia’s Bigfoot, is touring the U.S. through the first of November 2007, and is available for interviews and lecture appearances. He will be speaking at the 19th Annual Bigfoot Conference Bigfoot Expo at the Salt Fork State Park Lodge in Guernsey County, Ohio on May 19th, 2007. Be sure to catch Tony while he’s in the U.S. To contact Tony, email us.

Brent Raynes, the editor of Alternate Perceptions, has penned a wonderful review of Brad Stieger’s Worlds Before Our Own. “Once again,” he writes, “the most prolific and popular author we know, the legendary Brad Steiger has had another one of his greatest and most worthy classics reprinted.” Noting that this book “was a pioneering exploration of ancient global civilizations and so-called ‘erratics’—’man-made’ artifacts that turned up in unexpected places like primordial geological strata,” Raynes goes to say that “Brad had led the pack some fifteen years before Michael Cremo’s Forbidden Archaeology and others, and in a sense he was kind of like Barbara Mandrel in that song where she was country when country wasn’t cool!” I think Brad will be flattered by the comparison, even if he’s not a country music fan! Raynes ends his review with these words: “Though originally published nearly three decades ago, Worlds Before Our Own is still a very thought-provoking book written by one of the best qualified investigative writers to tackle such exciting and challenging historical controversies…”

Annalisa Ventola, who is author of the excellent blog Public Parasychology, recently reviewed two of D. Scott Rogo’s books in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, which by the way has the best book review section on topics of interest to us of any publication. The two books, A Casebook of Otherworldly Music and A Psychic Study of the Music of the Spheres, relate paranormal music experiences to out of body experiences, survival after death, and other psychic phenomena. Ventola writes that “Being both a musician and a student of psychical research, Rogo was in a unique position to provide an original contribution to the field, and did so by the age of twenty …” Ventola chose not to focus her criticism on Rogo’s “naivety about what constitutes proof of survival as well as the proper uses of certain statistical terms,” as she notes that Rogo’s subsequent books, some of which have been published by Anomalist Books, reveal a “developing maturity of the author both in the sense of his writing style and his methods of critical analysis.”

Ventola then summarized Rogo’s conclusions: “According to his content analysis, both experiences [transcendental music and out of body events] manifest during similar mental states, and the type of music heard (i.e. choral vs. instrumental or melodic music vs. music without a discernable melody) coincides with the type of OOBE (natural vs. enforced) reported. Rogo’s analysis also uncovers what he calls a ‘crescendo effect’ in the majority of the collected cases, in which the experients report the volume of mysterious music gradually being heard, rising to full power, and receding again.” Ventola ends her review with quite a compliment: “It is admirable that someone so young, without having yet completed a formal education, would not only have the initiative to collect reports about little understood or discussed phenomena, but also have something meaningful to say about them.”

John Fuller’s The Interrupted Journey is one of the two books (the other is The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects by Edward Ruppelt) that got us hooked on the UFO subject some 40 years ago. That book told the story the “first” UFO abduction, the Barney and Barney Hill encounter of September 1961. Fourteen years after the incident, NBC aired the story in a made-for-TV movie titled The UFO Incident with James Earl Jones as Barney Hill, and Estelle Parsons as Betty. Then in September of 2000, nearly 40 years after the original incident, a group of seasoned, independent UFO researchers got together at Indian Head, New Hampshire, to re-evaluate this classic UFO abduction case. Among the participants were Hilary Evans and Peter Brookesmith from the U.K., with Thomas ‘Ed’ Bullard, Karl Pflock, Dennis Stacy, and Robert Scheaffer from the U.S. Sociologist and veteran anomalist Marcello Truzzi chaired the meeting. And Betty Hill herself joined the group for an evening’s entertainment and a morning tour of the sites where, she says, she and Barney encountered aliens. What the participants concluded is recorded in our newest book, Encounters at Indian Head: The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Abduction Revisited, along with additional commentaries written especially for this book by the Hills’ first investigator, Walter N. Webb, and critical analyst Martin Kottmeyer. It was originally supposed to be published on the 40th anniversary of Betty and Barney Hill’s UFO abduction, but given trade publishing’s lack of interest in UFO books since the turn of the century, and other matters of both life and death, it hasn’t seen the light of day until now–thanks to Anomalist Books. Superbly edited by Karl Pflock and Peter Brookesmith, the book makes clear that the 2000 symposium at Indian Head was more than an exercise in diverse interpretations but a common quest to establish, as far as humanly possible, what actually happened to the Hills so many years ago.