Customer Reviews

Connections: Solving Our Alien Abduction Mystery

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I really liked this book. It is clear that the writers truely believe that they were abducted. Obviously I cant tell you whether they were or not, as I didnt have the experiences they speak of. Its a very interesting read and its very down to Earth. The writers themselves did not want to believe their experiences were due to alien interference. They wanted a rational explaination like anyone else would. I have a hard time believing that anna is crazy because I saw her speak in person and shes a rational woman. I would be more inclined to believe what she says. I wish that all the details she spoke of and all pictures she presented during class were included in the book, but to be honest there wasnt much that the book didnt include. All important pictures are displayed in the book and many stories and experiences are in more detail in the book. Enjoy!

This book absolutely was not rambling nor poorly written as one reviewer claimed. It's a carefully documented chronology of the experiences of two UFO abductees.

It may be uncomfortable for some people to read due to the controversial content matter, but I think these authors make a credible case for their abduction experiences. They are also very courageous to have shared the details of their rather difficult experiences.

I found this book hard to put down once I started it. I have shared it with several other people who also thought it was well done.

In a market becoming crowded with books of abductee testimony, a small number stand out as genuinely worth reading and shed new light on the subject. In 355 densely-written and highly literate pages, `Connections' tells the story of Beth Collings' and Anna Jamerson's extraordinary journey of discovery, in their own words, of their intertwining abduction history and of the people who helped them unravel it.

Budd Hopkins, arguably the greatest-ever researcher of this extraordinary phenomenon and a not-unsuccessful writer himself, says of this book:

"'Connections' takes its place on my shortlist of intelligent, thoughtful and eminently sensible books about alien abductions. Collings and Jamerson present their decades-long, mutually interlocking UFO experiences in a dramatic, highly readable and well-illustrated account. Despite the disturbing nature of their encounters, it is the authors' humanity and liberating common sense that finally affect us so deeply" - summing up this most excellent book to perfection.

Those who know Courty Bryan's superb 1995 book `Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind' will be somewhat familiar with the Collings-Jamerson case (though different names for the two were used in Bryan's book), as the second half of `CE4' discusses their case extensively. `Connections' is a kind of dual autobiography with alternate sections - sometimes a few lines, sometimes several pages - written in turn by each of the co-authors, as their histories are filled in and their joint history of emerging strangeness develops. Surprisingly, this narrative device works well, as the two accounts reinforce each other but often give differing perspectives. It's like watching a film with two separate, but ultimately interlocking plotlines.

When they first met in their 40s, the authors immediately had a feeling of recognition; that they `knew each other from somewhere.' Fate seemed to bring them together to work in the same 7-day-a-week business: Anna's horse-riding stables, where Beth moved into the spare room to live on site, and so more easily perform her duties as stable manager. Initially Beth was the one who seemed to be having the abductions - like close encounters with large UFOs over her car, accompanied by episodes of missing time - and Anna the one who became obsessive about investigating the phenomenon on Beth's behalf, reading up on the subject and trying to discover if anyone might be able to help make sense of these repeat-events or understand them, whilst denying she herself might be involved. She eventually contacted Don Berliner and Rob Swiatek at The Fund for UFO Research who took on the case; the late Richard Hall also became actively involved in their case and the rest of the book describes, in stages, how all this developed through the years - including a lot of night-time surveillance equipment set up and monitored by the Fund - and their agreeing to attend and participate in the 1992 MIT Conference chaired by Drs. John Mack and David Pritchard.

Many of the documented daytime abduction incidents were extraordinary, and not the kind of stuff you could make up. As with Katharina Wilson, the late Karla Turner, Barbara Bartholic and a number of other abductees in the USA during the 1990s, Beth became convinced that a minority of her abductions were radically different in character and feel, and might be actually carried out by some all-too human element related to the US military. One experience in particular certainly looks that way. This sounds like far-out stuff, but you need to read the details and the context before judgment.

`Connections' is a highly detailed examination of the abductee experience. It's brutally honest and contains some astounding revelations about the phenomenon simultaneously uncovered in the 1990s from other cases such as that of the late Dr. Karla Turner, the Brooklyn Bridge case and some of the work of Ray Fowler and the MA MUFON team. The text contains a number of useful illustrative drawings made by the authors which bring some of the reported events to life. What comes across most strongly is the hard-headed skepticism and incredulity of these ordinary folk, who continuously sought normal, rational explanations for all this strangeness until eventually being forced to face the fact, with great reluctance, that only the abduction narrative made any sense in explaining what was happening to them and that no other explanation was sufficient.

Although it weighs in at 355 pages the reader is never made to feel the book is overlong. There is a lot of detail, but the detail is necessary because it's a complex case and is never less than interesting. For the serious student or investigator of the abduction phenomenon who seeks a deeper level of understanding of how this thing seems to work, `Connections' is virtually indispensable and, as mentioned already by Budd Hopkins, would be on any knowledgeable shortlist of essential reading.

Received the book in about a day. I'm very pleased with the quick turn-around. I really enjoyed the book too.

I bought this book on Amazon and can fully understand why I paid .99 cents. This long rambling and incoherent 'book' is more suited for fire starter than it is for reading, aside from the fact its monosyllabic pages are poorly written. It is a tale of two chicks from Virginia who believe every confabulation of their thousand hypnosis sessions -- but for those more inclined to be serious, this book plainly demonstrates its authors surely are not.