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Book Reviews Perceptions Magazine, September 2018





Haunted:
Malevolent Ghosts, Night Terrors,
and Threatening Phantoms
by Brad Steiger with Sherry Hansen Steiger

Visible Ink Press
43311 Joy Road #414
Canton, MI 48187-2075
2018, 363 pages, US $19.95
ISBN: 978-1-57859-620-1
www.visibleinkpress.com

Reviewed by Brent Raynes

I begin this review with a mixture of excitement along with a genuine and dreadful sense of loss and sadness, for while it is a wonderfully, thoroughly and excellently written and well illustrated book, which isn't at all surprising considering its main author is none other than the legendary, award-winning inspirational, paranormal and UFO author-researcher Brad Steiger, a man who penned more than 180 books and more than 2,000 articles, but a man who I regret to inform my readers will be writing no more for us since his passing a few months ago.

Thus Haunted was Brad's last gift to us, his last thought-provoking literary contribution, gifting us this one final time an encyclopedic range of paranormal high-strangeness to once again puzzle and ponder some of this world's greatest mysteries. While the subtitle of this book speaks of malevolent ghosts, night terrors, and threatening phantoms, you can't have the dark without the light, and both Brad and Sherry again and again in their writings nurture us with the uplifting, positive, and transformational accounts as well, and this book is certainly no different. Like the story of Marcie, a lady who attended one of Brad and Sherry's seminars where they provided positive instructions and teachings. Marcie however complained of the lack of sensing a loving God in her life. She fumed that a fierce and demanding ancient tribal god must be hovering over her instead, and she failed to return the next day to complete the seminar. However, two weeks later, the Steiger's received a letter from this Marcie saying that she had been considering some of what they had been teaching, read one of their books on angels, and early one morning, after nearly a week of study and prayer, she awakened to a bright light shining in her eyes, which turned out to be a sphere of light about 4 feet across, floating near her bed, which produced a clear and soft male voice that told her, among other things, “You are loved unconditionally.”

And there are more such stories, including near-death experiences (Brad even had his own at age eleven as a result of a farm accident), out-of-body episodes, Native American spirit encounters (I was pleasantly surprised to see two of my own reports used on pages 25 and 26), hooded monk-like beings who teach and heal (read also about Brad's hooded helper), remarkable deathbed visions that were witnessed by others, like the remarkable angel-comforter experience witnessed by Rev. Maurice Elliott and Irene H. Elliott at the bedside of a dying woman, and many other encounters with angels, ghosts, poltergeists, and even what can only be best described as monsters or demons, like the small red glowing eyed Cucuy, shadowy darklings, the New England Pukwudgies, West Virginia's Mothman, New Jersey's Jersey Devil, and even tulpas (thought forms). This book introduces you to all of it, the proverbial good, bad, and the ugly (being fully informed is important). In addition, it touches upon modern findings and interpretations, like quantum physics, Jungian synchronicity, parapsychological studies and interpretations.

When it comes to ghosts and spirits, presumably of the departed, few accounts can be quite so dramatic and remarkable as the one included concerning the esteemed chemist, physicist and inventor Sir William Crookes and his experiences with the spirit of one Katie King. But then again, Brad always managed to keep the remarkable and mind-bending accounts flowing, and I appreciate how he could delve into these enigmatic matters and strive so well to provide some helpful and needed insight, context, and meaning to some of the most puzzling reported phenomena.

Brad's wife Sherry and frequent co-author traveled a similar path in her own life to that of Brad. In fact, it is as though some higher force/intelligence brought them together, which you can read about in this book too. An ordained minister who had an interest in the possibility of UFOs in the Bible, back in the 1980s Sherry served as a public relations director for Dr. J. Allen Hynek's Phoenix branch for the Center for UFO Research. In that role she had access to unpublished research and more than 80,000 documented UFO cases from 161 countries. Sherry had a background in nursing and was also a counselor for troubled youth, homeless migrant workers, and families in need of crisis intervention. Sherry authored/co-authored over 60 books, many dealing with the paranormal and spirituality. It is my sincere hope that Sherry will be able to continue in this work, in some ongoing capacity, a journey that she shared with such obvious conviction and passion with her husband Brad. Together they had been quite the dynamic duo and the fields of ufology, paranormal research, and spirituality were positively influenced, and so I hope that Sherry may be able to still carry on in the holistic roles that she has for so long served in herself.

**********


Beyond UFOs:
The Science of Consciousness and Contact with Non Human Intelligence,
Volume 1
Editors Rey Hernandez, JD, MCP, Dr. Jon Klimo, Ph.D., and Dr. Rudy Schild, Ph.D.
The Dr. Edgar Mitchell Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial and Extraordinary Experiences (FREE)
(a 501C3 Academic Research Foundation)
www.Experiencer.Org
www.ConsciousnessAndContact.Org

Available on Amazon:
2018, 820 pages, Paperback, US $29.95
ISBN-13: 978-1721088652

Reviewed by Brent Raynes

Beyond UFOs is a unique and academic based effort to analyze and explore the complex and controversial UFO contact phenomenon by addressing the previously and largely neglected need of conducting extensive quantitative and qualitative surveys of more than 3,200 responding experiencers, from more than 100 countries, all accomplished over a four year period of time, and subjecting this data to detailed review and analysis, with statistical breakdowns of its many aspects, accompanied by pie charts and graphs. Many of the contributors to this massive volume have impeccable and very distinguished academic credentials and backgrounds. The landscape covered in this research was not your typical mainstream “nuts and bolts” ufological exploration, but took a comprehensive look into quantum physics, consciousness, and parapsychological data because a high percentage of the experiencer data extracted from the FREE survey again and again reflected a potential relationship with such extraordinary and anomalous components of evidence.

During my approximately two year involvement with FREE, I assisted Jon Klimo and others in the Phase III study, as we looked through the qualitative data for representative and comparative accounts of various reported situations described by the surveyors, be it alleged alien medical procedures, descriptions of the beings, contact methods, telepathy, out-of-body travel, orb experiences, poltergeists, materializations and dematerializations, mystical, transcendental-type incidents, even NDE (near-death experience) related events, etc., etc. Kenneth Ring, a Psychology Professor, in 1992 published a statistical study he conducted of 97 UFO abduction experiencers and 74 separate NDE experiencers, concluding that these individuals shared traits that allowed them to enter sustained altered states of consciousness that enabled them to perceive non-ordinary realities. Some of FREE's survey was modeled, in part, by Dr. Ring's Omega Project Questionnaire survey approach done years earlier.

Many different authors-researchers contributed to this volume, including myself with chapter 13 (luckily I'm not superstitious) entitled “An Overview of the History of Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Contact Paradigms.” I explored comparisons between UFO contact experiences and Marian apparitions and other religious phenomena, as well as shamanic encounters, kundalini events, a variety of psychic experiences, the so-called “Oz Effect,” Jung's “psychoid” description, odd and apparent hemispheric brain shifts of experiencers, and other very curious and subjective components of many reported UFO/being encounters and interactions.

Other chapters contributed to this volume, in addition to the editors Hernandez, Klimo, and Schild, include the late Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell, Ph.D., Joseph Burkes, M.D., Preston Dennett, Kathleen Marden, Mary Rodwell, Susan A. Manewich, M.S., Rebecca Hardcastle Wright, Ph.D., Michael Austin Melton, M.S, Psy.D., Rev. Michael Carter, Mdiv., John Alexander, Ph.D., with concluding remarks made by none other than the esteemed Brad Steiger. A good number of other contributors and consultants are also named and acknowledged in this book for their help with this project.

A Volume 2 is planned in the months ahead.


Thursday, March 28, 2024