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

Physical or not, UFO phenomena often appear to display some directing intelligence. Is someone or something pursuing a plan to lead us in a specific direction? Many thousands of people have found their lives altered forever after the shock of an alien abduction, a channeled communication, or an unexplainable sighting. Witnesses have experienced false memories, time distortions, messianic complexes, increased IQ, physiological changes, even newly emerging psychic abilities. Watching this "alien impact," we see the birth of new religions, new arts, sciences, and belief systems.
Investigator Michael Craft makes a comprehensive study of some of humanity's oldest, and newest, encounters with the unbelievable. From the saucer crash at Roswell to alien "pregnancies," from crop circles to alien animals, from ancient civilizations to modern psychedelic research, Alien Impact explores the entire range of human contact with the "alien."

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.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Another here-come-the-aliens book that one might be willing to dismiss as mindless entertainment if it weren't so determined to pretend it's serious. Craft (Omega Institute of Holistic Studies) has cast his nets wide and pulled them back full--and he has thrown nothing away. Abductees, medieval elves, crop circles, ghosts, ley lines, Bigfoot sightings, secret government warehouses full of alien bodies: All serve equally as material for his wide-eyed speculation that something out there is trying to get in touch with us. Even folklore, horror fiction, and sci-fi movies are thrown into the hopper on the theory that, if the aliens were adopting a strategy of preparing our minds for their arrival, they'd use this kind of material. For good measure, the author throws in a few of his own occult encounters--a ``ghost dog'' spotted in a haunted house, a weird feeling while practicing tai chi on a Mayan pyramid. The argument rarely stays focused for more than a couple of paragraphs, and it plays fast and loose with science and logic. The author appears to have forgotten the relative distances of Uranus and Neptune, and he dates the dinosaur extinctions at ``hundreds of millions of years ago'' (although he is evidently not sure the giant creatures really are extinct). And he blithely skims over the fact that some of his themes (e.g., von Daniken's ``ancient astronauts'') have been thoroughly debunked. Only a few speculations, such as the ``Montauk Project'' (alleged time-travel experiments by the US Air Force with Nazi assistance), seem too flaky for him to swallow whole. While there is plenty here to give a susceptible late-night reader a good case of the chills, there is little for the intellect to grapple with. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.