Alien Impact: A Comprehensive Look at the Evidence of Human-Alien Contact

A compendium of the strange, Craft's first book, like the work of the 19th-century journalist Charles Fort, whom Craft credits, attempts not so much to explain the phenomenon of human-alien contact as to find it everywhere. It is all here: UFOs and chariots of fire; aliens and angels; channeling, the bigfoot and ley lines; crop circles, animal mutilation, the Philadelphia experiment, the Halls of Atlantis, Alistair Crowley, dwarfs and shamanism. Craft, the program coordinator at the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies, seems to have applied little method other than intuition in considering the most famous strange things that ever happened as aspects of a single phenomenon. At first he appears simply to conflate interplanetary hardware and religious concepts of inner space. The deeper into the past one goes, the more the ""gods"" look like spacemen, but the closer to the present one approaches, the more ""aliens"" appear to be parapsychological phenomena. Whether by design or chance, this technique has the effect of drawing the reader along in search of the author's perspective. That is duly delivered in the final chapters of this entertaining but scarcely analytical book. UFOs and aliens, we learn, appear to be psychic phenomena, yet they seem less like simple mental projections than like evidence of a ""directed intelligence"" that is intent upon ""deconstructing"" perceived reality, apparently for reasons to be announced. (Aug.)