William J Birnes. The Everything UFO Book: An Investigation of Sightings, Cover-ups, and the Quest for Extraterrestrial Life. Adams Media, 2012
Forget the subtitle, it isn’t. This book is just a collection of ufolore, having no value whatsoever for scientific UFO research, though providing an interesting insight for the newcomer into the weirder mind sets of American Ufology.
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Thus early one we get references to “scholars such as Eric Von Daniken and Zecharia Sitchin” I have heard Daniken described as many things, but scholar isn’t one of them.
Then we get the mysterious Nazi ‘Bell’, one of those things that doesn’t exist except in the fevered imagination of the sort of people who like to think fondly of the Nazis as super-scientists. All the nonsense about Roswell gets circulated, along with the tales of Phillip Corso, perhaps not surprising this, as Birnes co-wrote or ghost wrote, the barmpot ramblings of that former aide to one of America’s more notorious superannuated racist Senators.
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Thus early one we get references to “scholars such as Eric Von Daniken and Zecharia Sitchin” I have heard Daniken described as many things, but scholar isn’t one of them.
Then we get the mysterious Nazi ‘Bell’, one of those things that doesn’t exist except in the fevered imagination of the sort of people who like to think fondly of the Nazis as super-scientists. All the nonsense about Roswell gets circulated, along with the tales of Phillip Corso, perhaps not surprising this, as Birnes co-wrote or ghost wrote, the barmpot ramblings of that former aide to one of America’s more notorious superannuated racist Senators.
Needless to say we encounter crop circles, John Lear, all sorts of wild speculation about time travel, the Alan Godfrey/Zigsmund Adamski story, the Rendlesham story, ravings about Reptilians and so on.
Then there are the claims that “the government” set up Dr James MacDonald and forced his suicide. If (and it is a huge ‘if’) MacDonald was pushed over the edge by government agents this, of course, was not because he was a radical environmentalist, anti-nuclear power campaigner, anti-Vietnam war protester and all round radical leftist, all the more dangerous because he looked like a conservative small town banker rather than your average long haired, rock throwing hippy student. No, it was all because he was seeking out the truth about the UFOs. If ufologists really believed this nonsense you would expect the Canadian and Mexican borders to be blocked by the hordes of ufologists fleeing for their lives, but things seem curiously quiet in that respect.
Ufologists complain that they are ridiculed, but never seem to grasp that this is because they say and write lots of ridiculous things. – Peter Rogerson.
3 comments:
A superannuated racist senator? I guess J. Strom Thurmond (who later disowned the Corso-Birnes book) did achieve one record anyway, the one and only US, or UK, elected representative to reach the age of 100. Didn't he mellow a bit towards the end?
Bill Birnes is really good at putting two and two together. So good in fact he comes up with six
Birnes regurgitates junk. His now-defunct tv program - UFO Hunters - was junk, his snipits on 'Ancient Aliens' tv seies are junk and his UFO Magazine is junk.
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