I WALK THE LINE

Ben Mezrich.  The 37th Parallel: The Secret Truth Behind America’s UFO Highway. Heinemann, 2016

Sorry to disappoint folks, but if you think you are going to discover the truth about the UFO Highway or any other amazing secrets in this book you will be disappointed. It is not really a story about UFOs at all, rather it is the story of one of the people investigating them.
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Chuck Zukowski, is a computer programmer and one time unpaid deputy sheriff from Colorado who journeyed across the country with his wife and children in search of strange lights in the sky and mutilated cattle, and follows his interaction with the semi-mysterious Robert Bigelow who plays a bit part in this narrative.

It also portrays his and his sister’s interactions with police and military, which in one case led them being followed most of the way home by people in a dark van after Chuck’s sister Debbie had tried to get into a public restaurant that seemed to have been taken over by various agencies. In another case a wildlife warden is suddenly escorted out of a section of a national park by a group of military. Of course this feeds Chuck’s belief that there is a great secret out there. I suspect that the only secret is that people in uniform think they are the Lords of Creation and not public servants. Of course if Chuck and Debbie were black they would probably be dead by now.

Much of the folklore that one encounters in this book looks pretty strange and perhaps irrelevant to the real problems of the times. This would be a mistake; one can almost see a straight line, not an alien highway across America, but one from the fears over cattle mutilations to the anger that has led to the rise of Donald Trump. As for the alien superhighway, that comes in right at the end, as Chuck comes to believe that all sort of weirdness occurs on a line across the 37th parallel, as do a number of historic buildings. It is all very reminiscent of the failed claims for orthoteny, BAVIC and leys.

• Peter Rogerson