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'Good' UFO Books

Having moved house twice in the past 12 months, I’m getting quite used to packing and unpacking the hundreds of books that I own but don’t read anymore….. (I can’t bring myself to throw perfectly good books away even if I don’t refer to them) and I found this…

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Surely the definitive guide to all things UFO?

I have to admit that my copy comes complete with a coffee cup ring on the front cover…….I lifted this pic from the t’interweb!
 
taras said:
One I picked up in a charity shop recently which is well worth having: the Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters. Looks a bit like another "World's Greatest UFO Stories" type from the cover, but it's really a very comprehensive guide to most important cases and concepts (and quite a few I had never heard of!).

Contributors include Isaac Asimov, Jerome Clark, Erich von Daniken, Peter Davenport, Hilary Evans, Timothy Good, Marvin Kottmeyer, Jenny Randles, Carl Sagan, Whitley Streiber, Nick Pope, Ronald Story and Jacques Vallee, so it's certainly interesting and authoritative reading - one excellent aspect is that important topics are covered by several authors, who sometimes disagree with and respond to each other within the article itself.
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This book can be accessed online at the Wayback Machine:

https://archive.org/details/TheMammothEncyclopediaOfExtraterrestrialEncounters/mode/2up
 
The strange thing is that not only do UFO experiences mirror religious ones, religious ones also seem very UFOlike at times, and not just in a 'things seen in the sky' way.

My favourite example is one mentioned in a book I mentioned earlier in the thread, David Halperin's Intimate Alien - this is the July 1683 experience of 17th century religious scholar Abraham Cardozo. He also drew on it in an article for Magonia, below:

https://web.archive.org/web/2012030....com/2011/the-magonia-problem-david-halperin/

In essence Cardozo and another five witnesses see four figures on the 'moon' - three men and a woman, itself a highly symbolic group - then go in to dinner (yes, Halperin points out, exactly like the Father Gill sighting). The men later descended to the tree tops and "discussed Kabbalistic subjects with accuracy" before bidding farewell.

But then, next night, the three men return in the form of 'demons' and standing over Cardozo's bedside torment him. They are now dressed in black - yes, those three men in black, centuries before Albert Bender introduced them into UFO lore.
 
Paul_Exeter said:
I feel this man is closer to the truth than most:

https://ufoconjectures.blogspot.com/2022/10/jose-antonio-caravacas-approach-to-ufo.html
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From the short review piece: A mystery that tells us about the existence of "another" overwhelming and dazzling reality that, sometimes, and by unclear conjunctions, makes its way into our daily universe. A paradigm that tears space and time apart and shakes all our stagnant mental schemes about what may or may not be considered "possible" or even questioning our concept of "reality".

This sounds like the same ideas Dr Vallee has been presenting for the last 40 years or so based on only this short piece.
Have you read the book and if so how does it differ from what Dr Vallee has proposed in the past?
 
dr wu said:
From the short review piece: A mystery that tells us about the existence of "another" overwhelming and dazzling reality that, sometimes, and by unclear conjunctions, makes its way into our daily universe. A paradigm that tears space and time apart and shakes all our stagnant mental schemes about what may or may not be considered "possible" or even questioning our concept of "reality".

This sounds like the same ideas Dr Vallee has been presenting for the last 40 years or so based on only this short piece.
Have you read the book and if so how does it differ from what Dr Vallee has proposed in the past?
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Unfortunately still awaiting the English translation, but Caravacas has published some short essays tin English that can be accessed through the UFO Conjectures blog
 
Paul_Exeter said:
Unfortunately still awaiting the English translation, but Caravacas has published some short essays tin English that can be accessed through the UFO Conjectures blog
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I also recommend Daimonic Reality by Patrick Harpur.....it touches on many of the same ideas regarding ufos as well as related phenomena that can be interpreted in a similar manner.
From these ideas of the men we have been discussing as well as the experiences of witnesses over many years it seems we are not dealing with space travelers (from another planet) in the conventional sense but something other. And it also seems this other fits nicely into the metaphysical or supernatural realm where myth and archetypes exist.
 
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