Random box of UFO Books [Trenchant Edges]
853 words, about 6 minutes to read out loud
Welcome back to the Trenchant Edges, a Newsletter about why it’s a bad newsletter, lol. I’m your host Stephen and I hope you’re doing well in these wicked times.
I’ve had a busy, mostly positive, and very frustrating month. From getting a car for the first time in a decade, to job hunting limbo, to having a fever taking LITERALLY FOREVER to go away it’s been a time. Oh and it keeps looking like our leaders want to start WW3 to bring about the end of the world.
The downside is the predictable stress of precarity. The upside is I did make enough money to spend $40 and a few hours drive collecting a banker’s box of 28 random UFO books.
This was a delight and I want to go through them with you.
Random Book Haul
We're not going deep into any book here. And I can only have 9 images per gallery so this is going to be broken up kinda weird.
Our first batch are either books I've already read or books I won't read without some compelling new reason.
Annie Jacobsen, Ben Mezrich, Jim Marrs, Zachariah Sitchin, and David Jacobs are all people I don’t trust for varying reasons of middling interest. Jacobsen was a producer on the most heinous propaganda shot I’ve ever seen, Amazon’s Jack Ryan which eliminates whatever benefit of the doubt I was willing to give her for dubious decisions on this book. Ben’s book is fine, but the ending does a cliched HP Lovecraft oh no they’re about to get me as I write this shit that pissed me off.
David Jacobs seems sincere, but his belief in the efficacy of his hypnotic regressions makes me suspicious. Sitchin mistranslated a bunch of shit that people now take as gospel. And Jim Marrs is a John Bircher.
I don’t know anything about the others. But Kevin Randle says he was military intelligence and I’m not exactly looking for extra spies to lie to me about UFOs. We’ve already got plenty of those.
Let's see what's next
These are books I'm kind of interested in but not in any way that might actually get them read.
Here we have some big names. Philip Klass is arguably the most famous UFO skeptic in history. Steve Greer we’ve discussed before. I don’t think we’ve really gone into J Allen Hynek or Philip Imbrogno much. And I know we haven’t mentioned the rest.
I’ve heard a few interviews with Nick Redfern and nothing he said seemed really worth poking at. But this might be fun to go through.
And finally books I do want to read at some point.
And here we have either the cream of the crop or stuff that’s relevant to subjects I want to really dig into. Missing from this is Philip J Corso’s The Day After Roswell which is let’s say controversial. That, Chasing The Roswell Alien, and dreamland might be interesting for digging into roswell when I get around to it.
I’ve got a soft spot for anyone trying to pitch a weirder than aliens theory of UFOs so Ultraterrestrial Contact is an easy pick.
CE-5, Unconventional Flying Objects: A scientific Analysis, Cosmic Connection, and Alien Abduction, UFOs, and the Conference at MIT are all deep dives into subjects i don’t really care much about.
Antigravity Propulsion Dynamics looks to be in a rabbit hole I’ve been putting off for a while: The claim that anti-gravity tech was cracked in the 50s or 60s and is being hidden from everyone.
And if I have to explain to you why SILENT INVASION: THE PENNSYLVANIA UFO-BIGFOOT CASEBOOK is worth a read I fear you might be in the wrong place.
And the one I'm reading now:
I started this one purely on it looking like it had the most crank vibes of the whole haul and it didn’t disappoint: It starts off strong by accusing Christianity of being crypto-Egyptian mythology and ancient aliens and secret atlantis truthers of being a divide and conquer plot by some mysterious group of intelligence-connected ghouls.
I love knowing my instincts for high quality nonsense is undefeated. Or hell, maybe they’ll win me over by the end. You never know.
So far the thing that’s most interesting about it is the subtitle on the cover is: “The Truth About Extraterrestrial Life and the Mysteries of Ancient Egypt” but the inner cover goes deeper: Revealing the truth behind extraterrestrial contact, military intelligence and the mysteries of ancient Egypt.
With a little luck it won’t just be bullshit that traces back to military intelligence bullshitters like Rick Doty, John Lear, and Bill Cooper.
Wrapping Up
I’m trying to figure out how to make a version of this newsletter that makes sense.
Right now it’s kind of a half assed project made up on unfinished half assed projects. I want to fix this now that I can actually do the necessary work.
That’s going to take some introspection and market research.
We’ll see.
Hoping to have one of my more usual essays up before the end of the month.
See you then.
-S