We don’t know anyone who can pick an idea apart better, exposing its faults and highlighting its values, than philosopher and parapsychologist Stephen E. Braude, whose books The Limits of Influence, The Gold Leaf Lady, and Immortal Remains are classics in the field. In his latest work, Dangerous Pursuits, Mediumship, Mind, and Music, Braude does what he does best on issues of mediumship, super psi, multiple personality, and survival. And he caps off this volume with an excursion into the language of jazz improvisation, noting of course its links to psi. None other than Stanley Krippner found the book “a delight to read and to contemplate,” while Charles Tart entered an altered state, calling it “Excellent!”

Our newest book is subtitled “Miracles in an Age of Disbelief.” We think that at this perilous moment in time everyone—including disbelievers—would welcome a miracle. While we can’t make that happen, we can offer you philosopher Michael Grosso’s examination of miracles in Smile of the Universe, in which he looks beyond religion and science to better understand the parapsychological roots of miraculous phenomena. Prepublication reviewers love the book: “a tour de force,” says David E. Presti, professor of neurobiology, University of California, Berkeley, and Stafford Betty, Ph.D. in theology, calls the book “a brilliant and inspiring reading adventure.” Oh, and if you’re wondering about that title: The word miracle is rooted in a Sanskrit syllable smi, from which we get the English word smile. So a miracle refers to a smile induced by certain sensations of awe, beauty, and wonder. Let the universe smile upon us. Please.

Don’t think for a minute that this is just another sea serpent book.  Sun, Sand, and Sea Serpents manages to be not only a hard-nosed look at sea serpent reports from Florida, the lower eastern seaboard, and the Caribbean, but one of the most fun reads in the history of the genre.  Why?  Because author Dave Goudsward knows how to tell a story, going back to the original sources and interviews to get the facts straight, the science right, and the background for the proper perspective. And some of the stories he tells are real doozies. Sometimes the sea serpent is not the most unbelievable part of the story. After reading this book, you will likely never look at a sea serpent report in the same way again.

Those are the words of Dr. Diana Pasulka, author of American Cosmic, writing about our recently published book, Forbidden Science 4: The Spring Hill Chronicles, The Journals of Jacques Vallee 1990-1999. She continues, “Science is finally catching up with Vallee’s speculations, laid bare in Forbidden Science where this venture/adventure is documented, inextricably linked to discovery.” In Magonia, Jenny Randles said, “Here as reader you get what really happened day by day from a true giant of the UFO field.” And John Alexander, writing in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, said: “The rich tapestry of this chronicle reveals background material on a vast array of topics. What is guaranteed is that you will learn things about subjects you never knew existed…This is a veritable Who’s Who in the study of UFOs and other phenomena…it is mandatory reading.” But perhaps Jerome Clark summed it up best in Fortean Times: “As a unique original thinker, and the smartest guy in most rooms where ufologists congregate, Vallee is formidable…His contributions to UFO study equal anybody’s in their scope and insight…Forbidden Science 4 is a commendably open portrayal of the man, his strengths and flaws in full, brave view. If you care about this subject, you had better read it.”

The work of Michael Mayes entitled Shadow Cats: The Black Panthers of North America has drawn widespread praise from both advocates and critics alike. Sean Whitley, director of the documentary Southern Fried Bigfoot, says “It’s a hard-to-put-down investigation of the black panther mystery. Two paws up!” Reviewing the book for Mysterious Universe, Nick Redfern says that “..this is one of the best studies of the [black panther] phenomenon in the United States that I have read…Mayes does a good job of dissecting the eye-witness testimony… Some of the photographic data is impressive and eye-opening.” Writing for the Grayson • Olive Hill Quarterly, Jeremy D. Wells says that “the book is a compelling, confounding and comprehensive look at a phenomenon that captures the imagination and deserves more serious consideration.” Gerry Russell, writing for Magonia, says: “I was rather sceptical when I first started reading this book but I feel I am becoming a convert!… an exciting and worthwhile read.” But perhaps the highest praise has come from well-known skeptic Sharon Hill who writes: “”Mayes deserved congratulations for this bringing this book to print…there is no comprehensive volume on this topic so it deserved to be tackled…Mayes has a hair sample from a reported car collision but can’t get any experts willing to examine it. This is a shame. I do hope someone will step up and take a look…[the book] adopted a logical progression that was natural and comprehensible – exactly the approach that should be used to communicate to a lay audience…This volume usefully fills a niche in modern cryptozoological literature.” Congratulations, Mr. Mayes!

Eric Wargo, the author of Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious, received the best pre-publication endorsement we could ever have hoped for. It came from Jeffrey J. Kripal, the J Newton Rayzor Professor of Religion at Rice University, and the author of Mutants and Mystics and Secret Body. “I will not be shy,” Kripal began, “I consider Time Loops to be the most significant intellectual work on a paranormal topic in the last fifty years…” Other reviewers have not been shy either, including precognition researcher Julia Mossbridge, who in her review in the Journal of Scientific Exploration wrote: “If I don’t make you want to buy Time Loops, I’ve failed…Wargo presents the hypothesis…that the unconscious mind is consciousness displaced backwards in time.” Others piled on the praise as well. Wargo, said Mitch Horowitz, a former editor-in-chief at Tarcher and a PEN Award-winning author, “succeeds gloriously in providing this century’s first historical and analytic overview of precognition and its causes.” The superlatives don’t stop there, but we will with these words from Jenny Randles, who in the journal Magonia wrote “This book could be a Newton-plus-apple moment…”

The work of Montana State University Professor Emeritus Ardy Sixkiller Clarke has drawn acclaim around the world. She brings to the field of ufology degrees in history, English, psychology, and educational leadership and a background as a professor, licensed therapist and psychologist, and social science researcher. On the heals of her bestselling books, including More Encounters with Star People: Urban American Indians Tell Their Stories, comes her newest book, Space Age Indians: Their Encounters with the Blue Men, Reptilians, and Other Star People.  This work—which is a product of Clarke’s personal access to the American Indian community—is, without a doubt, her most startling and eye-opening book to date.

Stephen E. Braude, in his review of JOTT: When Things Disappear… and Come Back or Relocate – and Why It Really Happens in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, has the highest praise for the work of Mary Rose Barrington: “This book accomplishes the nearly miraculous achievement of being both substantive and highly entertaining… I’ve argued that we need fewer lab parapsychologists and more parapsychological naturalists, good observers (like the biological naturalist), who can record and systematize the subtleties of broad ranges of relevant phenomena and behavior…Barrington, in her book, plays this crucial role of the parapsychological naturalist, by looking at some unheralded peculiar events and then trying to incorporate them into the big picture. She focuses on a class of ostensibly paranormal phenomena that have received much less attention than, say, cases of apparitions and poltergeists. And she’s clear about why that is. The phenomena typically and all too easily get dismissed as merely a nuisance and are readily put out of mind…the best of these cases present real puzzles with serious ontological implications…” Robert A. Charman of Society for Psychical Research also strongly recommends the book: “The author… has applied her legal mind to investigating claims of objects that have disappeared and returned, or not returned, or have appeared for the first time, for which there appears to be no normal explanation such as memory lapse, absent mindedness, inadequate searching, third party trickery, deliberate deception, and so on…Barrington has over 180 cases of jott on file, grouped by similarity of occurrence into six categories…A lot of serious thought and much fascinating information has gone into the 190 pages of this book…”

Jacques Vallee needs no introduction to this audience. His remarkable career cuts across so many fields of interest to anomalists–from UFOs to parapsychology to remote viewing and more. And we are lucky that he has been keeping a record of his life, work, and passions in a series of journals that begin back in 1957 and now stretch to the last decade of the 20th century. His latest volume, Forbidden Science 4: The Spring Hill Chronicles, The Journals of Jacques Vallee 1990-1999, brings the reader behind the scenes at the founding of the National Institute of Discovery Science, the closed door sessions of the Rockefeller Initiative, his lunch and dinner discussions with intelligence and government personnel, and his field study of several notable UFO close encounters, all told with the refreshing intimacy of a dairy entry. If you haven’t read the first three volumes—Forbidden Science 1, Forbidden Science 2, and Forbidden Science 3—we recommend you start with those for the full adventure, though the latest volume will certainly fascinate and illuminate on its own.

Calling all forteans!  We have just published what may be the most important volume of fortean research since Charles Fort started it all exactly a century ago with the publication of his first and most influential work,  The Book of the Damned. That’s because Redemption of the Damned: Vol. 1 Aerial Phenomena by Martin Shough with Wim van Utrecht is a detailed re-examination of all 82 of that book’s anomalous observations in the fields of astronomy, meteorology, and atmospheric optics. The authors conduct a careful scientific investigation of these aerial mysteries of the past using the tools of the modern researcher. In the words of Bob Rickard, who has written the foreword to this huge (410 page), large format (8.27 × 11.69 inch), full-color book with more than 250 illustrations,  “It is the sort of study that true forteans have long hoped for and will welcome unequivocally as adding considerably to what we know of Fort, his work and its implication.”