Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times

by Jacques Vallee

Paperback, 2010

Status

Available

Call number

001.942

Publication

TarcherPerigee (2010), Edition: Original, 528 pages

Description

One of the most ambitious works of paranormal investigation of our time, here is an unprecedented compendium of pre-twentieth-century UFO accounts, written with rigor and color by two of today's leading investigators of unexplained phenomena. In the past century, individuals, newspapers, and military agencies have recorded thousands of UFO incidents, giving rise to much speculation about flying saucers, visitors from other planets, and alien abductions. Yet the extraterrestrial phenomenon did not begin in the present era. Far from it. The authors of Wonders in the Sky reveal a thread of vividly rendered-and sometimes strikingly similar- reports of mysterious aerial phenomena from antiquity through the modern age. These accounts often share definite physical features- such as the heat felt and described by witnesses-that have not changed much over the centuries. Indeed, such similarities between ancient and modern sightings are the rule rather than the exception. In Wonders in the Sky, respected researchers Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck examine more than 500 selected reports of sightings from biblical-age antiquity through the year 1879-the point at which the Industrial Revolution deeply changed the nature of human society, and the skies began to open to airplanes, dirigibles, rockets, and other opportunities for misinterpretation represented by military prototypes. Using vivid and engaging case studies, and more than seventy-five illustrations, they reveal that unidentified flying objects have had a major impact not only on popular culture but on our history, on our religion, and on the models of the world humanity has formed from deepest antiquity. Sure to become a classic among UFO enthusiasts and other followers of unexplained phenomena, Wonders in the Sky is the most ambitious, broad-reaching, and intelligent analysis ever written on premodern aerial mysteries.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member ChrisConway
This book is a compilation of historical testimony reporting strange aerial phenomena. Rather than speculate on the nature and origin of UFO's, Valee (the real life model of the French scientist by Francois Truffaut in Steven Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind") and Aubeck simply
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compile summaries and citations from historical writings spanning a thousand years. In the eleventh century, for example, Raymond de'Aguiiers, the Count of Toulouse wrote: "...we beheld a marvelous sign in the sky...there stood over the city a very large star, which, after a short time, divided into three parts and fell in the camp of Turks" (96). In a Seventeenth Century, we read a quote from a period document about a "Great Star which...gave so great a light, that some inhabitants here..could see to do business in the house by the light of it; one credible person here beheld it two hours together, and at last saw it turn into the perfect form of a Roman S, and then presently it divided in the middle, and one half went to the north-east, and the other to the south-eat, and so by degrees disappeared" (210). The book is a grab bag of anecdotes as told throughout time about strange things in the sky. Whether you believe UFO's are extraterrestrial in origin or not, this is a great compendium of aerial anomalies, free of wacky interpretations and such. In the book, the authors include several accounts of strange people or beings associated with the aerial phenomena described. If you're going to do research on UFO's, you're going to need historical research, a historical archive. This book is the best, the most exhaustive and most unbiased contribution to this kind of archive. But be forewarned... there's not much of a narrative, just a series of vignettes pulled from historical sources.
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Language

Original language

English

Physical description

528 p.; 6 inches

ISBN

1585428205 / 9781585428205

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