The possibility that humans are not alone in the Universe and might in the future come in close contact with other intelligences is one of the most intriguing questions of human history and has deep implications for our understanding of the Universe and ourselves. In this book the subject is dealt with in an interdisciplinary way, giving the scientific and technological implications, discussing the philosophical and religious connotations and rebuffing the pseudo-scientific statements. Based on our current scientific understanding of the Universe, the possibility of extraterrestrial life is discussed, summarizing cosmic, chemical and biological evolution. What we now know of the Universe suggests that life is common and extraterrestrial intelligent life is a possibility. The problem of searching for extraterrestrial intelligent beings is often reduced to radio telescope technology or the possibility of decoding a possible message. In many cases the idea of ETIs is loaded with anthropomorphism. The author discusses problems such as: what is intelligence? What is consciousness? Should we expect ETIs to be conscious beings and other philosophical issues? also examined and the possibilities of true contact with other intelligent beings are considered. At the heart of this book is an examination of the viability of future astronautics which would enable closer human contact with ETI than through radio messages taking thousands of years to reach their destination. The possibility of faster-than-light space travel is considered. The book addresses readers with an interest in general science, but also those with a humanist background, interested in the great philosophical debate about human nature, in particular the question of whether there is other intelligent life in the Universe, and the author counterbalances recent theories such as 'rare earth'.

This book describes the haunting of eighteenth-century England. It is the first in-depth study of the production, circulation and consumption of English ghost stories during the Age of Reason. This period saw the establishment of the ghost story as a literary genre. Handley combines close textual analysis with a broad conception of historical change. She examines a variety of mediums: ballads and chapbooks, newspapers, sermons, medical treatises and scientific journals, novels and plays. She relates the telling of ghost stories to wider changes associated with the Enlightenment, arguing that they played a key role in battles against atheism, republicanism, material excess and secularisation.

MICHAEL GRANT'S ACTION-PACKED AND MUCH ANTICIPATED NEW BOOK, SET IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE BESTSELLING GONE SERIES.

When the dome came down, they thought it was the end of the troubles. Truth is, it was just the beginning.

Shade Darby witnessed events that day, with devastating consequences, and vowed never to feel that powerless again. Now, four years later, she gets her hands on a part of the meteor that began it all – and that’s when she changes.

Trouble is, Shade’s not the only one mutating, and the authorities cannot allow these superpowers to go unchecked . . .

Pull up a chair or gather round the campfire and get ready for twenty-five creepy tales of ghostly hauntings, eerie happenings, and other strange occurrences in this all-new addition to the best-selling Spooky series. Set in the Buckeye State's big cities and rural communities, along the shores of Lake Erie in the north to the Appalachian Mountains in the south, the stories in this entertaining and compelling collection will have readers looking over their shoulders again and again. Ohio's folklore is kept alive in these expert retellings by master storyteller S. E. Schlosser and in artist Paul Hoffman's evocative illustrations. Readers will see the mystery of the missing postmaster's cousin solved, relive the long night a ghost captain saved a sinking ship, laugh along with a prankster who capitalizes on a barber's ghost, and feel an icy wind on the back of their necks on a warm Ohio evening. Whether read around the campfire on a dark and stormy night or from the backseat of the family van on the way to Grandma's, this is a collection to treasure.

On 28 May 1955, an announcement was made by The Cosmic Masters, through the unique Yogic abilities of the author, that a Spacecraft would come into orbit of the Planet Earth for a number of days each year to send great spiritual Healing powers to ALL people on Earth.

In June 2021, U.S. National Intelligence publicly admitted that UFOs are real physical objects and that they have been penetrating restricted military airspace since at least 2004. Despite this bombshell and further recent admissions by the Pentagon, the identity of these mysterious craft remains unknown. This book brings the full scientific method to bear on this enigmatic issue. Written by Daniel Coumbe, a former research scientist at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen with a PhD in theoretical particle physics, this book defines one of the first scientifically credible studies of UFOs in the modern era. Anomaly reveals new results derived from radar, optical sensors, and scientific instruments, rather than speculating on unreliable eyewitness testimony. This scientific approach provides the reader with clear and reliable answers, something that is desperately needed in the murky field of UFOs.

Honourable mention for The American Folklore Society's Wayland D. Hand Prize for outstanding book combining historical and folkloristic methods and materials. Runner up for The Folklore Society's 2022 Katherine Briggs Award for most distinguished contribution to folklore studies. The little-studied and once much-feared boggart is a supernatural being from the north of England. Against the odds it survives today, both in place-names and in fantasy literature-not least the Harry Potter universe. This book pioneers two methods for collecting boggart folklore: first, the use of hundreds of thousands of words on the boggart from newly digitized ephemera; second, about 1,100 contemporary boggart memories from social media surveys and personal interviews relating to the interwar and postwar years. Combining this new data with an interdisciplinary approach involving dialectology, folklore, Victorian history, supernatural history, oral history, place-name studies and sociology, it is possible to reconstruct boggart beliefs, experiences and tales. The boggart was not, as we have been led to believe, a 'goblin'. Rather, 'boggart' was a much more general term encompassing all solitary supernatural beings, from killer mermaids to headless phantoms, from black dogs to shape-changing ghouls. The author shows how in the same period that such beliefs were dying out, folklorists continually misrepresented the boggart, and explores how the modern fantasy boggart was born of these misrepresentations. As well as offering a fresh reading of associated traditions, The Boggart demonstrates some of the ways in which recent advances in digitization can offer rich rewards.

Do Aliens Exist? And if they do - what would they look like? Where would they live? Would they be conscious beings? And what would happen if they found us? These are the biggest questions we've ever asked - and here, Professor Jim Al-Khalili, theoretical physicist and host of BBC Radio Four's The Life Scientific, blasts off in search of answers. Coming with him are Martin Rees, Ian Stewart, Louisa Preston, Monica Grady, Sara Seager, Paul Davies and a crack team of scientists and experts who've made it their life's work to discover the truth. So get ready to visit the ice boulders and hydrocarbon lakes of Saturn's moon Titan, meet the tiny eight-legged critters that could survive in space, and learn about the neuroscience behind belief in alien abductions. Along the way, you'll enter the mind of an octopus, work out the probability of us finding an alien civilisation and discover whether quantum computing might hold the secret to life itself. Lively, curious and filled with scientific insights fresh from the cutting edge of the Galaxy, Aliens is the perfect book for anyone who has ever looked up into the starry sky and wondered: are we alone?

On this leg of the journey, readers will explore the scariest spots in the Big Apple. Author L'Aura Hladik visits more than 30 legendary haunted places, all of which are open to the public so visitors can test their own ghosthunting skills, if they dare. Join L'Aura as she visits each site, snooping around eerie rooms and dark corners, talking to people who swear to their paranormal experiences, and providing a firsthand account. Readers may enjoy "Ghosthunting New York City" from the safety of an armchair or by hitting the road and using the maps to find 50 more spooky sites and "ghostly resources." Take the A(HRT) Train to the spookiest subway ride of your life.

Drawing from social theory and the anthropology of religion, this book explores popular media’s fascination with dreams, vampires, demons, ghosts and spirits. Dreams, Vampires and Ghosts does so in the light of contemporary animist studies of societies in which other-than-human persons are not merely a source of entertainment, but a lived social reality. Films and television programs explored include Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Twin Peaks, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Truly Madly Deeply and the films of Hitchcock. Louise Child draws attention to how they both depict and challenge ideas and practices rooted in psychology, while quality television has also facilitated a wave of programming that can explore the interaction of characters in complex social worlds over time. In addition to drawing on theories of film from Freudian psychology and feminist theory, Dreams, Vampires and Ghosts uses approaches derived from a combination of Jungian film studies and anthropology that offer fresh insights for exploring film and television. This book draws attention to explicit and subtle ways in which cinematic narratives engage with myth and religion while at the same time exploring collective dimensions to social and personal life. It advances new developments in genre studies and gender as well as contributing to the growing field of implicit religion using in-depth analyses of communicative dreaming, the shadow, and mystical lovers in film and television.

Bigfoot Huge, hairy, foul smelling, this legendary apelike animal continues to captivate the public's imagination. This fascination hinges on a single piece of motion-picture film shot in northern California in 1967. For thirty-five years, Bigfoot believers have been convinced that this sixty-second piece of film proves the physical reality of Bigfoot.
But now comes a book that demolishes that belief, that produces final proof that the film footage is a hoax.
"The Making of Bigfoot" tells the amazing story of Roger Patterson of Yakima, Washington. A part-time rodeo rider, chronically unemployed and dying of cancer, Patterson propelled himself into short-lived fame and fortune by exploiting his obsession with the Bigfoot subject and leveraging his expertise in manipulating and conning people to pull off one of the world's great hoaxes.
Living within two hours of Patterson's hometown, for three years paranormal investigator and author Greg Long interviewed more than forty witnesses in Yakima who knew Patterson intimately. The voices of these witnesses, combined with facts unearthed from newspaper archives, books, and court documents, tell the real story of Roger Patterson.
Both tragic and comical, a unique slice of Americana, "The Making of Bigfoot "captures the testimony of a colorful cast of characters who bring to life a man and a time in the 1960s when Bigfoot strode into the American imagination, and the world embraced a myth.

The spectre of the UFO, as popularised by shows such as The X-Files, has brought an astonishing slant to the face of modern religious practice. But what motivates the fantastical and sometimes sinister beliefs of UFO worshippers? UFO Religions critically examines some of the fascinating issues surrounding UFO worship - abduction narratives, UFO-based interpretations of other religions, the growth of pseudo-sciences purporting to explain UFOs, and the responses of the core scientific community to such claims. Focusing on contemporary global UFO groups including the Raelian Movement, Heaven's Gate, Unarius and the Ansaaru Allah Community, it gives a clear profile of modern UFO controversies and beliefs.

Tonight, across America, countless people will embark on an adventure. They will prowl among overgrown headstones in forgotten graveyards, stalk through darkened woods and wildlands, and creep down the crumbling corridors of abandoned buildings. They have set forth in search of a profound paranormal experience and may seem to achieve just that. They are part of the growing cultural phenomenon called legend tripping. In If You Should Go at Midnight: Legends and Legend Tripping in America, author Jeffrey S. Debies-Carl guides readers through an exploration of legend tripping, drawing on years of scholarship, documentary accounts, and his own extensive fieldwork. Poring over old reports and legends, sleeping in haunted inns, and trekking through wilderness full of cannibal mutants and strange beasts, Debies-Carl provides an in-depth analysis of this practice that has long fascinated scholars yet remains a mystery to many observers. Debies-Carl argues that legend trips are important social practices. Unlike traditional rites of passage, they reflect the modern world, revealing both its problems and its virtues. In society as well as in legend tripping, there is ambiguity, conflict, crisis of meaning, and the substitution of debate for social consensus. Conversely, both emphasize individual agency and values, even in spiritual matters. While people still need meaningful and transformative experiences, authoritative, traditional institutions are less capable of providing them. Instead, legend trippers voluntarily search for individually meaningful experiences and actively participate in shaping and interpreting those experiences for themselves.

Using occultism to understand the paranormal sounds like diluting water or burying earth, but in this thoughtful and unusual book Duncan Barford draws on a deep familiarity with modern magick to provide a valuable toolbox of concepts for exploring the relationship between consciousness and the paranormal. Writing in an accessible and humorous style, Barford examines intriguing first-hand accounts of poltergeists, telepathy, communication with the dead, religious phenomena and astral projection. The essence of his unique exploration is that the paranormal does not happen only to special people and on rare occasions. In fact, to experience the paranormal we need simply turn our attention to the nature of our consciousness itself.

For centuries, the mountains of western North Carolina have inspired wonder and awe. It was only natural that man, after gazing at such scenic wonders, would turn some of the mystery he felt into legend. Sometimes these legends attempted to explain natural phenomena, sometimes they attempted to explain an occurrence that appeared to be supernatural, and sometimes they grew up around the eccentric characters that were drawn to the isolation of these mysterious hills. This collection of eighteen stories presents some of the mystery and awe that the mountains convey, and it may alter your perception of the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains forever. You may never stand atop Roan Mountain during a storm without thinking you hear a ghostly choir. You may gaze at the top of Chimney Rock during a hazy summer afternoon and wonder if it really is a ghostly cavalry fight you see. If you spend the night near High Hampton, you may find yourself listening for the call of the lonesome white owl. If you stand at Wiseman's View, you will probably think that you, too, can see the Brown Mountain Lights. Standing atop Clingman's Dome, you may wonder if there really is an enchanted lake where animals flock to heal their wounds somewhere in the valley below. And you will always wonder if the fly you hear on your mountain walk means that Spearfinger is lurking nearby. For several years, folklorists Randy Russell and Janet Barnett have taught a course about Southern folklore at the North Carolina Center for Advancement of Teaching in Cullowhee, North Carolina. Russell is also the author of several mysteries, including Edgar Award nominee Hot Wire. They live in Asheville, North Carolina.

Based on fieldwork in the north Indian state of Rajasthan, this book focuses on supernatural affliction - illness and misfortune ascribed to demonic spirits or ghosts and to other mystical agents, such as sorcerers and witches. The study augments and extends the existing scholarship on a range of issues, including inter alia beliefs about spirit possession, sorcery, witchcraft and the evil eye. The themes of ritual practice, especially exorcism or healing ceremonies, Hindu priests and curers, popular Hinduism and pilgrimage are discussed, and the anthropology of South Asia is explored with an emphasis on medical anthropology and Indian ethnomedicine. At a theoretical level, the book sharply contrasts with much of the literature on spirit possession or on supernatural affliction and its treatment, as the author's phenomenological orientation involves movement away from psychological or psychiatric paradigms as well as from other forms of Western rationalism that have tended to dominate scholarly work. The book thus offers fresh insights, both in terms of understanding supernatural malaise and its treatment, and in terms of the application of the approach the author engages.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203222539

This amusing, revealing, and entertaining romp through the confused and controversial history of the UFO craze is a must for believers and skeptics alike. Shockingly Close to the Truth is the first and only comprehensive tell-all history of ufology from two men who have been at the center of this cultlike movement for close to half a century. James W. Moseley conveys the fun he has had over the years pursuing tall tales and purported evidence of visitors from outer space. As the creator of the newsletter Saucer Smearuthe source on the follies, foibles, fads, and feuds of ufologyuMoseley has the inside scoop on the amazing world of serious UFO sleuths and wigged-out osaucer fiends.o His co-author, Karl T. Pflock, has been tracking reports of unidentified flying objects for close to half a century and has written the most thorough investigation of the Roswell incident ever done.
For Moseley it all began as a lark in 1953 when he drove across country and interviewed almost 100 UFO experts and eyewitnesses, including former president Harry S Truman. After all these years, his account of this journey is here published for the first time, a goldmine for anyone interested in modern social and oufologicalo history. He also talks candidly about his encounters with and assessments of leading UFO personalities, including Budd Hopkins, George Adamski, J. Allen Hynek, and many others. In addition, he reveals the whole truth behind the infamous Straith letter hoax, the real origins of the Men in Black, and the true story of George AdamskiAEs alleged 1952 encounter with oa man from Venus.o Along the way he recounts his incredible adventures as a grave robber of pre-Columbian artifacts in Peru (Move over Indiana Jones ), to which there is also a bizarre UFO connection. Complementing the exuberant narrative are many original photos of famous persons and events from MoseleyAEs private collection, plus facsimile reproductions of the Straith letter and the complete October 1957 special Adamski exposT issue of SmearAEs predecessor, Saucer News.
A feast for UFO buffs this book will also interest students of popular culture, social trends, and the psychology of belief.

Is SETI a genuine scientific research programme? The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has been given fresh impetus in the last years of the 20th century following developments in space science which go beyond speculation. The evidence that many stars are accompanied by planets, the detection of organic material in the circumstellar discs of which planets are created, and claims regarding microfossils on martian meteorites have all led to many new empirical searches. Against the background of these dramatic new developments in science, David Lamb evaluates claims to the contrary, and examines recent attempts to establish contact with other intelligent life forms. He also assesses competing theories on the origin of life on earth, discoveries of former solar planets, proposals for space colonies and the consequent technical and ethical issues. Most importantly he considers the benefits and drawbacks of communication with new life forms - how we should communicate and whether we actually can.

Since 1968's "Night of the Living Dead," zombie culture has steadily limped and clawed its way into the center of popular culture. Today, zombies and vampires have taken over TV shows, comic books, cartoons, video games, and movies. "Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy" drags the theories of famous philosophers like Socrates and Descartes into the territory of the undead, exploring questions like: Why do vampires and vegetarians share a similar worldview? Why is understanding zombies the key to health care reform? And what does "healthy in mind and body" mean for vampires and zombies? Answers to these questions and more await readers brave enough to make this fun, philosophical foray into the undead.

Plato's legend of the famed lost continent of Atlantis has become notorious among scholars as the most absurd lie in literature. Exciting our imagination and our curiosity, Atlantis Destroyed explores the possibility that Plato's account is the historical truth.
In this fascinating account, Rodney Castleden considers the widely-debated location of Atlantis and its destruction, the literary origins of utopian Atlantis and how this became confused with Plato's authentic account and also the remarkable parallels between Plato's narrative and the bronze age civilisation in the Aegean.

Hardcover collector's editions of all 7 volumes of the Earth Chronicles Series in a display slipcase
- Includes "The 12th Planet," "The Stairway to Heaven," "The Wars of Gods and Men," "The Lost Realms," "When Time Began," "The Cosmic Code," and "The End of Days"
- The culmination of Sitchin's 30 years of intensive research offering indisputable documentary proof of humanity's extraterrestrial forefathers
The Earth Chronicles series, with millions of copies sold worldwide, represents the culmination of Zecharia Sitchin's 30 years of intensive research into the history and prehistory of Earth and humankind as recorded by the ancient civilizations of the Near East. Within these volumes, Sitchin--one of the few scholars able to read and interpret ancient Sumerian and Akkadian clay tablets--presents indisputable millennia-old proof of humanity's extraterrestrial forefathers, the Anunnaki, who visited Earth every 3,600 years from their home planet Nibiru.
This boxed set of hardcover collector's editions with enhanced maps and diagrams includes all 7 volumes of the Earth Chronicles series: "The 12th Planet," "The Stairway to Heaven," "The Wars of Gods and Men," "The Lost Realms," "When Time Began," "The Cosmic Code," and "The End of Days."