MONSTER MASH

Jason Offutt. Chasing American Monsters. Llewellyn, 2019.

No-one reading this book should be expecting a critical scientific survey of cryptozoological phenomena in the USA. That’s not what it’s for, it’s a rollicking read of accounts of encounters with the weirder denizens, or in many cases, pseudo-denizen, of the 50 states.

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DIGGING UP GHOSTS

Jeb J. Card. Spooky Archaeology, Myth and the Science of the Past. New Mexico University Press, 2018.

We know what archaeology is not like, don’t we? Intrepid adventurers with fedora hats hunting down Nazis, saving the Ark of the Covenant, discovering cursed skulls and uncovering lost cities and ancient pagan cults. Archaeology isn’t anything like that is it?

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UFOLOGY MEETS KREMLINOLOGY

Nick Redfern, Flying Saucers from the Kremlin. Lisa Hagen Books 2019.

With a title like this, you could be forgiven for thinking this was a book about UFO sightings from Russia and the former Soviet Union, following Ion Hobana's and Julien Weberbergh's 1972 UFO's from behind the Iron Curtain. But the book isn't about that. Subtitled 'UFOs, Russian Meddling, Soviet Spies and Cold War Secrets', the book is an attempt to show that the Russians have been manipulating the UFO phenomenon and its witnesses since the days of the Contactees right up to the present.

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