Jerome Clark's 1998 The UFO Book

You can still find Jerry Clark’s superb “historical” litany of UFO accounts and persons.

Barnes and Noble has it for about $6, and I’m sure there are other places where it is offered.

Mr. Clark provides, in his 705 page tome, all the UFO stories we think we know; that is, he fleshes out the iconic UFO tales, we mull over superficially, with details that are rarely included in our discussions.

For instance, he gives meat to the Trent/McMinnville photographs and hoaxes we thought we’re real stories (told by honest people), and much more.

I found his run-down of CE3 (UFO encounters with beings), on pages 89 through page 100, to be particularly interesting, many not known by me (or you I imagine).

And his presentation of The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (and Science), beginning on page 188, ending on page 218, is a must-read for newbies and oldies alike.

While he book is almost 20 years old, it still seems current, considering how many of us ruminate, nowadays, about the UFO material he addresses.

In those pages about Close Encounters of the Third Kind, one will find witness accounts that seem to show that for a large swath of UFO lore, people kept seeing and interacting with smallish, little “men” wearing uniform-like outfits and doing all kinds of odd things: picking flowers, retrieving a hoe for a farmer who dropped it, in his excitement at the “alien confrontation” or the woman who saw (in 1957) “a flat bowl-shaped object with a broad rim” with a helmeted, long, olive colored face, sitting on that rim, dangling his feet inside the bowl, where vehicle levers could be seen, The man looked at her with a “quizzical expression.”

There is much to behold within the UFO literature, material that can’t be dismissed for current or new sightings (that pale in comparison to today’s sightings) as those older sightings are an integral part of the total UFO phenomenon, which must be studied holistically in order to understand (and eventually explain) it.

RR http://ufocon.blogspot.com – The UFO Iconoclast(s)