I highlighted many passages, like this one:

By the end of the weekend I realized how quaint was the mere suggestion that Christians f this type should learn to “be rational” or “set aside your religion” about such things as the Iraq war or other policy matters. Once you’ve made a journey like this – once you’ve gone this far – you are beyond suggestible. It’s not merely the informational indoctrination, the constant belittling of homosexuals and atheists and Muslims and pacifists, etc., that’s the issue. It’s that once you’ve gotten to this place, you’ve left behind the mental process that a person would need to form an independent opinion about such things. You make this journey precisely to experience the ecstasy of beating to the same big gristly heart with a roomful of like-minded folks. Once you reach that place with them, you’re thinking with muscles, not neurons.

Where the book goes awry is his treatment of the truther movement. I’m not a truther, but I will admit to being truther curious. And there is a very big difference between the blind followers of religion and blind followers of a conspiracy movement – as religious as it may seem to be. The Christian right teaches one to obey authority, the truther movement teaches people to resist it. So while some of the truther arguments are totally dubious, trutherism is a kind of gateway drug into questioning authority. It’s not that you have to believe that Dick Cheney did bring down the towers, but that he could – that government doesn’t always have the lives of its citizens at heart.

For some reason, he blames truth derangement totally on the left.  That’s his thesis: the right has Christian fundamentalism, the left has trutherism. Somehow he does this without mentioning Ron Paul and the anti-government right. What separates trutherism is that it crosses party lines, and it’s possible that it’s healthier for people on the right to distrust a Bush-led government, rather than be a Tea Partisan who thinks Obama is a socialist (truly deranged), and Bush was a great American.  In the book there’s a sense of Jon Stewart equivalency. Just because a is crazy and b is crazy doesn’t make a and b equal.

Of course, questioning authority can also lead to birtherism. But there is at least some evidence to question the official 9-11 story, and Taibbi doesn’t say, at the very least – well, yeah, what’s up with Building 7? It doesn’t make someone “clinically insane” (his words) to ask that question. His takedown of trutherism is pretty devastating, given the number of improbable factors that would have to fall into place.  But trutherism represents a larger idea – that the government is involved in a lot of dangerously unsustainable behavior, and people have latched onto 9-11 to hopefully make the entire house of cards come tumbling. It’s misguided, maybe, but understandable – i.e. not entirely deranged.

By that token you could say the same thing about fundamentalist Christianity – because life is depressing, it’s understandable if people wrap themselves in the blanket of religion.  Likewise, truthers would have a better time if they were protesting something immediately provable – for not calling non-believers heretics and focus on other pressing concerns, like the economy or the environment – things that could collapse leading to a far worse crisis than 9-11.  There’s a good argument for that, but 9-11 truth is an extension of many of those concerns.  Fundamentalist Christianity is a closed system where no other competing information is considered. In the balance of derangement, the latter is much worse.

Given the collapsing state of the country, perhaps the person who’s not paranoid is the one who’s deranged.  Even Taibbi would argue that the government is very often up to no good.  As he writes about the debt ceiling deal:

It strains the imagination to think that the country’s smartest businessmen keep paying top dollar for such lousy performance. Is it possible that by “surrendering” at the 11th hour and signing off on a deal that presages deep cuts in spending for the middle class, but avoids tax increases for the rich, Obama is doing exactly what was expected of him?

This is a deal that will make poor people suffer and rich people get richer. No, this is not murdering 3000 people in an inferno, but it hurts people – so it doesn’t take a crazy leap of logic to distrust the government’s motives. His thesis is that politics has been so laced with bullshit that people have been forced to create their own reality. Yet he doesn’t mention that politics is so laced with bullshit, that maybe they’re bullshitting about 9-11 as well.  Interestingly, the Obama administration is creating a new sense of derangement on the left – with people adopting the language and message of Alex Jones: the Obama Deception.  Except this time the derangement has a basis in easily-provable reality.  A reality that Taibbi believes in himself.

The book was written before the emergence of the Tea Party, and Taibbi ends on an optimistic note, reporting how the divide between the left and right may become less pronounced, given that people on both sides are seeing through the bullshit. Although it’s become abundantly clear that the Democratic party is working in concert with Republicans, the divide between the left and the right has never been more stark. And maybe even more necessary. The Tea Party clearly don’t see through the bullshit – somehow they cannot see that shifting government power to unfettered corporate power solves absolutely nothing.  The derangement continues, and given the rise of the Christian right in concert with tree of liberty derangement, the Great Derangement is probably just an introduction.

Hard to get a sense from Redfern’s prose if this is a widespread issue, or just something toyed at by a deranged minority. The trouble is that the book is primarily in Redfern’s own voice, rather than quotes of his informants. He also has only a few informants, and although they might have a terrifying worldview, there’s no sense of how this worldview is regarded by the mainstream in government. If, for example, Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/etc. care at all about this issue, so it somehow played a part in the war in Iraq. As crazy as Michelle Bachmann is, does she ascribe to this theory? The book doesn’t get into it – just the word of a few faceless subjects. The real premise of the book is that there could be many people in government who believe in this theory, not necessarily that there are.

All that said, I enjoyed it for the premise alone…because I’m basically writing this scenario in The American Book Part II – though mostly from the perspective of the Collins Elite’s worst nightmare: disclosure of a spiritually/technologically advanced race, who are the Anti-Christ in the sense that they disprove elements of Christianity. But then, if there is such a “false prophet” then maybe the Bible was actually being prophetic…

I write fiction because I can get into what I believe without claiming any of it to be true. If there’s a spiritual dimension to the Grays, it would make more sense that they are part of some eternal system of spirituality, rather than centering around a 2000 year old religion constructed on this small planet. This is especially true when you factor in the misinterpretation of the Bible, as is often the case with the religious right regarding Revelation or even the concept of demons themselves:

Did you know that the word “demon” is only mentioned twice in the Old Testament and never in the context of a hell or underworld? Did you know that the Hebrew term used for “demon” has no parallel in other Semitic languages for a denizen of hell or an underworld? Did you know there are no instances of demonic possession in the Old Testament? And what about the word for “demon” (daimon) in the New Testament — it can be used of any spirit being, good or evil. There are also no biblical verses that call fallen angels demons.

So the American Book II is about disclosure. I am so sick of alien invasion stories with weapons. I’m more interested in an alien that invades the world with the idea of a provable God. Could be just as destructive, but for totally different reasons. This whole premise is why I wrote TAB Part I – it doesn’t touch on the UFO issue as much, but acts as an introduction to the ideas I really want to cover. Basically, how do humans integrate with the rest of the cosmos.

If you’ve been reading TAB II online, I’m sorry. I haven’t stopped writing, but I have stopped looking backwards. I reached a point in the book where I didn’t want to keep revising chapters and posting them, I wanted to move forward with the story. So I’m writing a lot, I’m just not a very good serializer.

I recently read Asterios Polyp and dug that more.

Update: Looks like Apocalypse Nerd got the “Shaun of the Dead” treatment.

WASTED: Teaser Trailer from tupaq felber on Vimeo.

Notes from the Edge Times is a kind of Daniel Pinchbeck for beginners.  And I understand the necessity for that totally. It’s just as important for these ideas to be reaching the mainstream, and diving right into 2012 might be too tall an order for many readers – as at times that book can read like a scholarly dissertation, as he deconstructs the work of a writer like Walter Benjamin.  This book also feels a bit like Daniel Pinchbeck for the cell phone reader generation.  Chapters are three pages, if that – as if they’re intended to be read on a commute, waiting at the doctor’s office, etc.  Which means it’s an easy and breezy read, but also doesn’t really delve all that deeply into the ideas he’s proposing.  For new readers, they’ll want to look at his earlier books for elucidation.  For old readers, it sometimes feels like chapters end abruptly just as he was getting started.

As this book doesn’t entirely build on his past work, but condenses it, there’s a feeling of something missing.  If we are really going to evolve as a species, what would this look like in practical terms? Would all of us evolve at once, a small segment of the population?  What would then happen in either circumstance?  Would we wake up one day with an intimate knowledge of the infinite?  These questions are necessary if he indeed believes that expanded human consciousness is an inevitability.  Even if we don’t suddenly evolve, but at the very least adopt a more-progressive value system, how can this happen given the state of the world?  Without those questions, these ideas have the tendency to seem quixotic and vaguely hopeful without offering a real prescription for the future.

The book makes the case that Pinchbeck’s Evolver project is doing some of this work – bringing like-minds together who are all interested in sustainability. The social network is like the technological precursor to connected consciousness.  I’m a monthly supporter of Evolver – I’m just not convinced this is enough, given the opposition.  I most definitely have a darker outlook, while still holding out hope.  My worldview is like the hippie ethos through the lens of Black Flag.  I can’t shed my cynicism and pessimism about the state of the culture and then just send waves of compassion to those who actively working to destroy what society has built – or see this as fully effective.

Much of this book was written before the mass psychosis that’s hit the country in the form of the Tea Party. He might (rightly) argue that this regressive element has been present in America from the founding.  But when you have the media legitimizing the voice of lying malcontents and billionaires like the Koch brothers, who seem to be architects of the apocalypse, it’s hard to be hopeful and not see how the world’s going to move forward without a major societal breakdown.  Suggesting otherwise veers into wishful thinking.  In other words, it’s impractical.

Even he admits this to be the case:

With the earth’s population expanding and burgeoning middle classes in China and India demanding a fairer share of dwindling resources, the American lifestyle needs to be radically downscaled.

This is not outright advocating depopulation – though paranoids about the New Age movement would probably see it as such – but there is no method given for how the American lifestyle can be downscaled short of saying it needs to be. When he does offer potential legislative solutions, it becomes problematic:

The American diet must also change radically. Rigid limits must be put on personal consumption of meat, which require massive inputs of water and grain, as well as fish, since the oceans are almost empty and aquaculture creates toxic waste.

I’m in total agreement with this, I just don’t see how this is possible without producing widespread outrage. In the current climate, saying “because of Global Warming” will just lead to mass protests because there are so many radical deniers. But the deniers in this case have a point – enacting legislation to curb freedom is a slippery slope that could lead to a liberal sort of fascism, the suede denim secret police. Nevermind if it’s totally necessary, rationing meat consumption would be decried by every sector of the populace. Which means legislation like this could only happen if there was some major systemic collapse and people finally realized, “Oh shit, we better do something.” Ironically, though, this would be the flipside of the Patriot Act – a trauma to the country which causes people to allow the curbing of freedom in the interest of national security.

I understand why Pinchbeck doesn’t want to go the depopulation route – because then his vision for humanity is no different than another Book of Revelation myth. It will cause people to actively wish for civilization’s downfall – whether it’s via the environment, the economy, or war – because this will mean that the utopia can then begin. It’s no doubt troubling – but it’s also troubling that Pinchbeck doesn’t even bring up this argument, as if he’s afraid of the consequences. Anti-New Age conspiracy theorists could throw these arguments back in his face and claim him to be a neo-liberal fascist, but what’s been so illuminating about his past books is his utter fearlessness. And in this book it seems like he’s wary of facing the obvious.

What’s positive about the Zeitgeist movement is that it’s moved on from the conspiracy theorizing of the first movie to how we can turn this system around.  The second movie focuses on the Venus Project. I haven’t seen “Zeitgeist 3: Moving Forward” but its title suggests that it will be focused on a real-world examination of how to get out of this crushing cycle.  While I’d love to believe that elevated consciousness will descend on the human species, it seems much more likely that the cycle will kill itself before that’s allowed to happen.  This is darkly pessimistic, but it’s hardly off the wall, and Notes from the Edge Times needed to start addressing these real world considerations.

As he opines in a recent Coast2Coast appearance, the world is likely to grow and disintegrate at once. The Tea Party, for one, are an example of the disintegration, a reflection of our growing dystopia. The Tea Party may peter out eventually, but that almost doesn’t matter – they have proven that reactionary elements are very powerful. Not just the billionaire funders, but the legions of people who actually believe a conservative like Obama is a communist. See above for the difficulty in bringing radical ideas to society when right-of-center, corporatist policy is seen as radical. It’s incredibly frustrating, and perhaps I’m asking too much of DP: I was hoping for an answer to – How in the hell do we transform society when regressive thinking has so much power among people, media, and government? Saying it’s an uphill battle is beyond understatement.

I don’t want to rain on optimism – and still when reading a book by Pinchbeck I feel more optimistic about humanity’s capacity than when I went in. I just don’t see how the transformation is possible without some calamity. And if myths speak truths, there’s an argument that this is how it should be. I just don’t want to have to witness it.

In Inner Paths, I was hoping for a book outlining how psychedelics could be used to contact the greys, for example. Much of DMT research seems to be passive – taking the “drug” and seeing what happens, rather than actively trying to seek out certain entities. This is more than likely out of the potential of humans, even with the aid of an entheogen, but it would be an interesting experiment. Inner Paths to Outer Space could have been a step towards that experiment, but it didn’t entirely offer information that wasn’t already available in Spirit Molecule.

On the potential of this topic, I enjoyed MM&M more. The best parts were when the synthesis of other people’s work was mixed with his own personal experiences, especially when experimenting with the Psychomanteum. I wished there was more of that – Micah Hanks trips with DMT, for example. If he’s not ready to go there (and I’m not sure I am either, especially with Ayahuasca – at least not yet) then he could have included more information from other people’s experiences. A quote from Daniel Pinchbeck’s Breaking Open the Head gets a short, four-line paragraph. One of the joys of reading a book like BOTH is that you’re along for the ride on Pinchbeck’s trip. It can be mind-altering without ever taking anything. So Hanks’ book could have been a more powerful synthesis if it included more information from its sources.

The book felt a bit to me like John Keel’s Haunted Planet – extremely eye opening and fascinating, but also felt like it could be 500 pages longer. Which is just a way of saying – the book’s great, but wished it was longer so it could be greater. And that he’s in Keel’s company says a lot – I’ll be checking out what he writes in the future, as well as his site, the Gralien Report.  As an introduction to everything in the title, it’s an excellent summation, and likely has a lot more to do with the UFO phenomenon than waiting for aliens to make contact on the White House lawn. It’s just as likely that they’re waiting for us to contact them first.

The problem with this is it’s merely trading one fantastic story for another one.  Though Pilkington claims classified projects and disinformation are the “mundane” explanation for UFOs, it’s fairly outlandish in itself.  What he’s claiming is that the U.S. military have access to extraordinary technology as fantastic as anything from outer space.  But really, this needs as much evidence as the ET hypothesis.  That there are disinformation agents is already understood – but those agents aren’t proof that UFOs are all man-made.  And if they were, this would mean that the US military has craft that can hover for hours and then disappear, craft that are the length of football fields, etc. But this requires faith in the overwhelming power of the military. If they were so powerful, then Iraq wouldn’t be such a clusterfuck. And while the Stealth bomber has technology that’s beyond my understanding, it’s still just a big lumbering airplane.

This isn’t a debunking book entirely, however.  It straddles the line between skepticism and belief.  He basically reviews the book towards the end:

In the many years I’d spent absorbed in the UFO subject I’d vacillated between wide-eyed optimism and hardened skepticism, settling on something awkwardly in between.

The book has a feeling of being “awkwardly in between” without necessarily holding to one overwhelming thesis. With a subject as complicated as this one, that makes sense, but at times it feels a bit like no man’s land – you can’t really lock down his perspective.  He’ll jump from skepticism to belief and then back again.  Mostly, the book comes down on the side of skepticism.  In the conclusion, he writes,

The stories that people tell about UFO events are just as important as the incidents themselves….And, as they grown more distant from their source, these stories expand and and evolve, like ripples thrown into a pond, interfering and interacting with each other, and with us, the people who hear them. It’s at this point that they become myths, and over time myths shape our imaginations and the way that we experience the world. This is the true power of the UFO and that, ultimately, is what this book is about.

So the UFO story is only a myth.  I’ll grant that the UFO story is as fascinating as lights in the sky, but once you reduce something to “just a myth” it has the tendency to reduce its importance. It writes something off as merely the work of imagination: “Ah, it’s just a story.”

The book centers around a UFO convention in Laughlin, Nevada.  I have never myself set foot in a UFO convention or MUFON meeting.  Perhaps being subjected to the devout believers of this subject is like going to a fundamentalist Christian church and coming away thinking all believers are nuts.  The myth-making of the disinfo agents only contributes to feeling that this is “just a story.” But this is also like saying God doesn’t exist because the stories in the Bible are unrealistic or unverifiable.  The story of UFOs is as big as God – which is why it’s so attractive – but also why it can’t be written off with the limited information we have available. Until God is proven or disproven, the topic is still up for debate, and it’s more than just an idea to medicate the masses.  The myth of UFOs may be wishful thinking, but given the size and age of the universe it’s also logical.

He goes on,

UFOs are a matter of belief, a faith whose core myths are taking on the shape of a religion; and, like any other faith, it deserves our respect, whether or not we want to share its tenets.

Except this isn’t true – UFOs aren’t a matter of belief.  UFOs are a matter of record.  Believing that they’re from outer space is a matter of belief.  Believing also that all of these UFOs are government-made is – at this stage – a matter of belief.  Until the circular government craft lands on the White House lawn – the same thing people demand of ET UFOs – the whole matter is still open to question.  This book doesn’t prove the man-made UFO hypothesis any more than Steven Greer’s Disclosure proves the ET hypothesis.  The possibility that UFOs are man-made is eye-opening, but it’s not definitive. Additionally, the man-made UFO hypothesis could just be a cover by disinfo agents for something that even they don’t understand.

That idea is not touched on enough in the book, and so it becomes a debunking book without factoring all of the sightings and speculative discussion that might counteract this thesis.  And the fact that he uses MJ-12 to punch a hole in the UFO story suggests someone who is looking for an easy way to call bullshit.  MJ-12 is widely regarded as fraudulent, and those who hold up MJ-12 as legitimate (Stanton Friedman) are not to be trusted.  In its place, Pilkington wants us to believe in something that is no less fantastic.

I’ll freely admit I’m in the “Want to Believe” camp with Fox Mulder, so UFO skepticism hits me where I don’t want to be hit.  But also I don’t think this book takes into account the full range of UFO lore, and sort of picks and chooses which cases to debunk from some of the most dubious material available. At the same time, this would suggest that this book is entirely a debunking book.  It’s not. There’s also material in here that would give a hardened skeptic pause about the possible reality of ET UFOs.

So it’s a good read for believers as well, and I recommend it – if only for the fact that it’s important to have your worldview challenged.  But also the book puts a face on UFO disinformation.  There can be a tendency to think that the UFO issue is being silenced by them.  But “they” are people with jobs, homes, families.  In a way this book enhances the reality of the whole phenomenon by putting a face on something that can seem supernaturally elusive.  At times though, because the book leaves so much on the cutting room floor, it has the feeling – especially in its myth-driven conclusion – that Mark Pilkington himself may be one of the Mirage Men.

The strength of his writing becomes a problem because his lead character, Robert Langdon, is supposed to be a Harvard professor brainiac, and his dialog isn’t any better written than the prose – so the Harvard professor sounds like he’s talking to third graders when he’s talking about supposedly the most important subjects in human history.  But I forgive that – because I love the subjects Langdon is talking about.  And The Lost Symbol is basically The Da Vinci Code meets “The Secret.”  Every book about these subjects can’t be Umberto Eco, and these sorts of ideas are better disseminated in this sort of pop prose.  Frankly, it’s pretty amazing that these books are so popular and aren’t met with more controversy.

The book is full of interesting facts that I’m sure many of the snobs who revile his writing didn’t know.  Like the etymology of the word “sincere,” why Moses is depicted with horns in art, and other fascinating bits of information. And there are paragraphs like this:

From the Crusades, to the Inquisition, to American politics – the name Jesus had been hijacked as an ally in all kinds of power struggles.  Since the beginning of time, the ignorant had always screamed the loudest, herding the unsuspecting masses and forcing them to do their bidding.  They defended their worldly desires by citing Scripture they did not understand.  They celebrated their intolerance as proof of their convictions.  Now, after all these years, mankind had finally managed to utterly erode everything that had once been so beautiful about Jesus.

Say what you will about the hokiness of some of this book – but that message just rules.  There are many moments like this – taking stabs at fundamentalism, Mormonism, and revealing how religious figures have whitewashed certain ideas throughout history.  Beyond the codebreaking and cliffhangers, there’s a lot of relevant and truthful information.  Of course, it helps if you believe to a certain degree in Brown’s spiritual outlook – a Gnostic take on spirituality.  The potential for science and religion to overlap.  On these topics, I’m pretty much a believer.

One of the things that irritated me to a very strong degree was Robert Langdon’s incredulity and skepticism.  While I understand having the lead character be a skeptic because it makes the ideas seem more plausible – hey, even the skeptic believes in them – this book’s written as if Robert Langdon exists in a vacuum.  He just spent an entire book traipsing around Europe, deciphering codes, and proving the myth of the Holy Grail.  You’d think that maybe he’d be a little more open to some new evidence of codes and ancient knowledge.  Just believe, man, the book would be a lot more fun.

All told, I enjoyed The Lost Symbol as much as The Da Vinci Code, for the same reasons.  The book basically parallels many of the same ideas in The American Book of the Dead – that human consciousness is set to expand where we are able to control reality with our thoughts.  What The Lost Symbol doesn’t cover (SPOILER) is just how this new society would work.  My premise in TABOTD is that – perhaps – the human population has to be reduced and easily-controllable in order to unleash this power.  And so, the evil Cheney-esque despot hatches his plan to reduce the population via World War III.  From The Lost Symbol:

“The Apocalypse is not the end of the world, but rather is the end of the world as we know it. The prophecy of the Apocalypse is just one of the Bible’s beautiful messages that has been distorted…”

Basic premise of my novel – except it occurs after a literal apocalypse.  What exactly is the alternative?  Supposing we all were given the power of the “infinite.”  There are some seriously deranged and dangerous people on the planet.  Give these people the power to affect reality with their thoughts and – who knows – reality might disappear.  You’d then have wars of the mind.  In other words, it wouldn’t be that much different than what we have now – disintegrating and adversarial.

Unless…the “revelation” was that we were “all one” etc. and so killing someone would lose its purpose.  Still, a world in which thoughts became reality would be fairly chaotic.  An interesting topic, and really the entire impetus behind TABOTD, so whatever criticism I have of Dan Brown, the writer, I’m glad he gets these ideas out into the open.  It’s good news that he’s so obscenely successful.

For someone with health problems – and health problems that relate to my heart – the death of someone 34 years old who’s obsessed with some of the same ideas as I am was a hit to the soul.  He’d been a sort of online friend for many years.  I’ve never met him, corresponded a few times via email, but one of the great things about his blog was that you were along for the ride with him.  His mind was a community.  Proud that he linked to The American Book of the Dead way back in 2004 when it was a different blog – proof that I’ve been working on this story forever.  He was one of the first people I wanted to send my book.

To be perfectly honest, when MT would sometimes elucidate on his ideas in long-form prose on his blog it sometimes had the flavor of trying too hard – as if he was trying to write, and not letting it flow naturally.  So I was wondering if his book would have the same type of issue.  Not at all and The Cryptoterrestrials is one of the best books on the subject I’ve read.  It condenses the ideas from myriad sources with a great sense of clarity and poetry.  I’m not entirely sure how this would read to someone who knows nothing about the subject – in a sense it’s important to be a “believer” (by that all I mean is open) – to tackle the ideas in the book.  But if you are open to these ideas, there’s limitless wisdom to extract from it.

I thought as well that John Shirley was being nice for a deceased friend in the quote on the back: “The most refreshing speculation I’ve seen on the paranormal in ages…Mac Tonnies’ final Fortean landmark is the Book of the Damned for the 21st Century.”  Really: the number of ideas in this book condensed into just over 100 pages is remarkable and electrifying.  It covers the gamut of possibilities about ET life, while not proselytizing about any of it.  It’s the opposite of a fundamentalist book, as some UFO books can be, it’s really just a mind opener like the best of writing of this sort by Jacques Vallee or Robert Anton Wilson.

Which of course makes Mac Tonnies death even sadder.  I wondered if Mac Tonnies was more of a born blogger than a born writer (I haven’t read his Mars book or book of stories).  But this book shows that it could have been the beginning of a great career.  He could have become one of the giants in the field.  Judging by the Amazon rank for this book – #7 in UFOs – that’s happening regardless.

Someone on Amazon criticizes the book for offering too much hypothesis in the place of actual theory.  In other words, MT could have said all aliens come from Pluto and it would have as much validity as saying they come from right here on earth.  What’s useful and refreshing about the book is that it doesn’t purport to make any claims either way, which is important for something as elusive and unknowable as this subject tends to be.   In any UFO literature it is absolutely wrong to talk of anything with any sense of certainty – right now we can only guess about what’s happening. So he doesn’t spend time listing the reports of, for example, craft seen coming out of the ocean to prove aliens live here right on earth.  This book is more about the implications of alien life, not about proving their existence – which is incredibly smart and useful.  The naysayers say, “Where’s the proof?” when the more-important question is, “What are the implications if this is real?”

As a solid hypothesis, Tonnies’ book is persuasive, if only because it’s written by someone who so deeply cares about the subject, and for the fact that he doesn’t claim any one theory is “true.”  That’s all you can hope for in a book about these subjects – to actually solve this mystery is as impossible as saying, “This is what God looks like.”  This book isn’t about one single answer – it’s about the importance of asking limitless questions.

The thought of someone so enamored with life’s mysteries dying so mysteriously is dramatic, to say the least.  Again, I never met him, but he often seemed so disillusioned by his life – so much more comfortable in the ether of the weird.  So I have a fantasy that the Ufonauts came to him during the night and said, “You want some answers?”  As someone who was so insatiably curious about inner and outer space, and disaffected by the limits of this mortal coil, it would be surprising if he didn’t take them up on their offer.  It really lends a different meaning to this illustration on the first page of the book: