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Book Reviews Perceptions Magazine, April 2020







Hidden History: Ancient Aliens and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization
By Jim Willis

Visible Ink Press
43311 Joy Road #414
Canton, MI 48157-2075
May 2020, 432 pages, 7.125” x 9.25” Trade Paperback, U.S. $19.95
150 B/W Photos and Illustrations
ISBN-13: 978-1-57859-710-9
ebook ISBN: 978-01-57859-718-5

Reviewed by Brent Raynes

Author Jim Willis, who has a master’s degree in theology from Andover Newton Theological School, is no stranger to delving headlong into controversial subject matter. In fact, I previously wrote a review of his earlier book Supernatural Gods: Spiritual Mysteries, Psychic Experiences, and Scientific Truths in the August 2017 edition of this magazine and did an audio interview with him in the September 2017 issue. [Perhaps it’s time to do yet another]

However, for now I had best stick with reviewing this book. In it, Jim gives us a great deal of thought-provoking information to sift through and ponder. From an abundance of fascinating scientific facts and theories, mounting DNA evidence, as well as historical written texts, ancient artifacts and early civilizations like Gobekli Tepe, along with curious mythologies and folklore from around the world, Jim presents a growing body of evidence that the vast majority of historians and various other “experts” aren’t picking up on, and he admits to being quite discouraged over this “entrenched apathy,” adding how he cringes when he and other noted writers and responsible and scholarly researchers like Andrew Collins and Graham Hancock are referred to as authors of “alternative history” or “fringe science,” when in reality they’ve struggled to objectively research, update and fact check their data quite thoroughly and conscientiously.

Growing evidence indicates that there have previously existed in ancient times people and civilizations that were quite advanced. Much more so than we previously recognized. Jim complains how scientists generally will simply shake their heads and say something like, “We just don’t know,” when confronted with such evidence. For example, and something I’ve pondered myself in puzzlement, are those enormous stone blocks at Sacsayhuaman, Peru, many weighing over three hundred tons, some that weigh up to 360 tons, that despite their irregular shapes fit together with what can only be compared to laser-like precision. A giant stone jigsaw puzzle, the stones transported to the site from a distance of as many as twenty miles. Standard cranes used in our modern construction projects today are only able to handle 20 tons. Presumably there are only two cranes in the United States that are capable of lifting 200 tons. And, the author points out, Peru isn’t the only place where this dilemma exists. Consider also the huge stone blocks of Baalbek, Lebanon, weighing around 800 tons, with the largest one still in a quarry at 1,200 tons! Or how about the “super megaliths” in the mountains of Gornaya Shoria, in Siberia, believed to be 3,000 to 4,000 tons which, when compasses are brought close by, the needles swing away from these them. “We just don’t know.” Indeed.

Jim just can’t tolerate that kind of thinking. He wants to find the answers. While he admits we’re just on the verge of scratching the surface in our search for answers, we mustn’t suppress any potential part of our history with any sort of biased thinking. He points out how in recent years revealing new discoveries, bones, DNA evidence, and artifacts are rapidly giving us important new clues and insights into our past, while in terms of academia’s study into human origins he complains “it’s a jungle out there.” He gives the example of how if you bring up the concept of “intelligent design” in an academic setting you’re liable to be accused of being unscientific and even of trying to corrupt young mind with “superstitious bigotry” while if you speak of your acceptance of Darwinian evolution at a conservative clergy retreat you may be accused of being everything from a tree hugger to a supporter of one’s local PBS station. Jim points out that we know of six mass extinctions in our planet’s past. There, of course, could have likely been more. Perhaps many more. There could have been some advanced species and civilizations in the past, like the legendary Atlantis, of which we know nothing today, where cataclysmic events could have thrown them back into a stone age. “If that were to happen to us, everything we know about space travel, radios, Twitter, and Facebook would be lost overnight,” Jim wrote. “We would become simply another species that didn’t make it.”

Jim even gives serious consideration to the theory that extraterrestrial visitors to our planet in the past may have played a significant role in some of the myths and legends from numerous cultures around the world. As an example, he presents a picture of unusual looking guardian statues said to have been ancient gods who protected a village in Tamilnadu, India. He recounts the fascinating Hopi belief of how their original home was in the Pleiades and how they survived two cataclysmic events, saved during both those events by the so-called “Ant People,” and how back at some point these ancient people had “flying shields.” The author presents in this book many tantalizing similarities and deep questions for the readers to ponder and question, from ancient mythologies, civilizations, artifacts, and genetic studies, to modern scientific discoveries, reports and theories – of so many unsolved mysteries that don’t yet add up - all strongly suggesting that our world, our reality, may be far more complex, perplexing, and fascinating than many of the “experts” of academia are presently capable of fully and satisfactorily discerning and recognizing.


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Quantum Science of Psychedelics: The Pineal Gland, Multidimensional Reality, and Mayan Cosmology
By Carl Johan Calleman, Ph.D.

Bear & Company
One Park Street
Rochester, Vermont 05767
March 2020, 352 pages, 6 x 9 Paperback, U.S. $24.00
Also available as an ebook
Includes 118 b&w illustrations
ISBN: 978-1-59143-362-0 (print)
ISBN: 978-1-59143-363-7 (ebook)
www.BearandCompanyBooks.com

Reviewed by Brent Raynes

Carl Johan Calleman, the author of seven previous books, including The Nine Waves of Creation, has a Ph.D. in biology from the University of Stockholm and is a former senior researcher of environmental health at the University of Washington in Seattle. In this book, however, Dr. Calleman takes his readers on a very unique journey to recover forgotten clues and insights from the ancient shamanic visionary and psychedelic world (as envisioned through substances such as ayahuasca and DMT), explaining how an evolution of consciousness is still unfolding and gradually making itself known in our modern world of quantum science. He explains how the mind for most of us acts as a “reducing valve” that limits our ability to more fully experience altered states of consciousness that allow for powerful mystical insights and healing states.

Dr. Calleman strives to unveil the existence of quantum energy waves that radiate out from the center of our universe, speculating that there are a total of nine such waves whose existence is echoed globally from such sources as the Hopi who spoke of nine universes, the Aztecs nine underworlds, and the Viking’s of a mythic Tree of Life called Yggdrasil which connected with the nine worlds of the universe. He embraces the physicist John Stewart Bell’s theorem of quantum non-locality, believing that this quantum energy is not limited by the speed of light, that we could potentially be instantaneously connected with this quantum energy state even if we are tens of billions of light years away from its source.

Calleman delves deeply into ancient Mayan cosmology, describing their beliefs about a cosmic Tree of Life [pointing out how it is generally agreed that the Tree of Life is the most widespread of ancient myths and seemingly a part of all cultures throughout the world] and shares many rare and unique insights and information that he has acquired from his years of painstaking research. In fact, even as he was writing this book science confirmed the existence of a central cosmic axis, that fits the archetypal description of a Tree of Life, and he includes a photograph of it in chapter three. His book explores a complex range of data and possibilities and has many moving parts, so to speak. He also ventured out into the field, participating himself in about a dozen ayahuasca ceremonies in the vicinity of Iquitos, Peru, with different shamans of Jivaro and Mestizo backgrounds. From my own ufological path a number of things caught my eye. For example, the author reviews Dr. Rick Strassman’s DMT (dimethyltryptamine) study with the comparisons of the DMT experiences to some of Dr. John Mack’s alien abduction cases, and though I was already familiar with this, I was interested to read how Strassman and Mack had intended [sadly never accomplished because of Dr. Mack’s death in 2004] to do a follow-up study giving some of the abductees DMT to see if they might recognize the state induced by this as similar. Meanwhile, Calleman makes other interesting points, like the ancient Mayan belief in a cosmic umbilical cord connecting Mayans to the navel of the First Father in the Place of Creation and reports of our modern “abductees” claiming streams of light entering their navels levitating them up into UFOs. Then too there’s the “wounded shaman” portrayal of the bushmen of Africa’s Kalahari Desert, who in cliff paintings may be shown with bodies pierced, or an animal with bleeding from the nose, with whom a prominent mantis deity in their prolonged rhythmic trance dances may be consulted before a hunt. Meanwhile, with shamans of the Amazon, visionary encounters with insects such as mantises are not uncommon with ayahuasca either.

Am I reaching too far including a wounded shaman, nose bleed and mantis being in with the modern alien abductee experience, with the alien related cuts, scratches, nose bleeds, and mantis type beings [and let us not forget Vallee’s inclusion of the “little people”] in with the Strassman/Mack data? Of course, for the most part, comparative analysis of what people describe is pretty much all that is available for us to work with. In many respects, some of it seems pretty compelling and somehow connected.


Thursday, March 28, 2024