John Pinkney

JOHN PINKNEY is a popular Australian journalist, author and screenwriter.

'TRUE STORIES: WEIRD & WILD' (Volumes 1&2) are his latest children's books for Kindle.

The TRUE STORIES book-duo is designed for youngsters aged 10-16.

The two volumes investigate some of the profoundest puzzles facing human-kind.

Few teenagers would know much about the sheer myriad of mysteries the volumes describe:

Brilliantly-lit UFOs which have swooped on schools worldwide...Savage bears and wolves that raise lost children as their own...Dreams that have foretold future events in uncanny detail - sometimes preserving the prediction in print or on film. And multitudes more enigmas - mind-stretching and seemingly impossible to solve.

The TRUE STORIES presentation encourages teen readers to think open-mindedly,as the best scientists do.

And to remember that humanity's place in space, illumined by a trillion suns, is a place well- worth exploring.

Our universe is not only stranger than we imagine - it's stranger than we CAN imagine.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Pinkney's original screenplay Thirst, directed by Rod Hardy and produced by Anthony I. Ginnane, won Best Horror Film prize at the Asian Film Festival.

His three-act drama, The Face in the Mirror, was co-awarded Best Stage Play in the General Motors/Elizabethan Theatre Trust competition.

For many years John was a prominent writer with Australia's Age newspaper, subsequently moving his column Pinkney Place to News Limited's national daily The Australian.

Here, he covered what was arguably the most extraordinary UFO case in history: the disappearance of young Melbourne pilot Frederick Valentich, after radioing Flight Services that he was being 'orbited' by a gigantic craft. An intensive naval and air force search produced no trace of the vanished flier. The RAN and RAAF crews could find no scrap of floatable wreckage from his Cessna.

The case gradually ebbed from the media. Then, two weeks later, hobby photographer Roy Manifold opened it again. He sent Pinkney a series of six shots he had taken 20 minutes before pilot Valentich's final broadcast. Unaware that the pictures contained anything more than an ocean sunset, Roy did not look at the prints for two weeks. One of the photographs showed a large object exploding from the ocean in a burst of speed. The image was analyzed by physicists and aerospace engineers at the US organization Ground Saucer Watch. Their conclusion: the anomalous intruder was a bona fide unidentified flying object, possibly metallic, apparently surrounded by cloud-like exhaust or vapor residue.

Roy Manifold's photo made its public debut next day on page one of The Australian. From there it became a talking point around the planet.

The famous photograph appears in A Paranormal File. And Pinkney's deep-probing analysis of the case - including the official 6-minute transcript of Fred Valentich's conversation with Flight Control - can be found in Australia's Strangest Mysteries #2. Some investigators believe the actual recorded conversation extends beyond 30 minutes, and contains material deliberately withheld from the public.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

"HOW MY AFTERLIFE ODYSSEY WAS BORN"

John Pinkney's novel, Grave Injustice:An Afterlife Odyssey, is published by Kindle in ebook and paperback.

The tale had its origins in a vivid dream.

It was a strange spectacle that invaded John's sleep when he was 16 - and haunted him after that.

In the debut edition of A Paranormal File, published in Australia, 2000, he described what he nocturnally 'saw':

'(It was) a dream which I believe was of profound significance in my young life,' he wrote.

'I found myself standing, in a state of ecstasy, in the kitchen of an old weatherboard house.

I walked out onto the back verandah. Dusk had begun to thicken into night. But in the garden, flowers were clearly visible.

'They pulsed in the darkness, infused by an inner light. And the colors of their petals were colors I had never seen before. Colors beyond any spectrum I knew.

'It was like no dream I had ever experienced. I woke from it with the sense that I'd returned from a long journey - and was profoundly unhappy to be back in my narrow bed.

'I hadn't a clue what the dream signified - but I was convinced it had shown me something real: a dimension which had been invisible to me, but was in fact central to my existence.

'It wasn't until years later that the media began to discuss NDEs (near-death experiences.) People revived from clinical death described the "ecstasy" they'd felt, recalled seeing colors beyond the known spectrum - and spoke of their unwillingness to return. Elements of the dream that had puzzled me for half my lifetime were being discussed in the newspapers!

'As a healthy teenager, I'd been nowhere near the end of the mortal coil. But on reading the press accounts, I wondered whether my dream had somehow offered me a glimpse of life after death.

'There's a strong school of medical opinion which holds that NDEs are nothing more than hallucinations, triggered by a shortage of oxygen to the brain. But a significant number of medical researchers, among them Dr Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and Dr Raymond Moody (have) disagreed.

'There is, they argue, a consistency and internal logic to the stories their resuscitated patients tell. And sometimes these patients have returned from the grave's edge with knowledge they could not have obtained in the "normal" way.

' All the NDE patients who have told me their stories have agreed on one point. Whether or not they are conventionally religious, they say they no longer fear death. They see it not as an end, but as a beginning.'