5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Some Amazing Color UFO Photos, June 30, 2009
This review is from: The Secret Life Of Paul Villa: UFO Contact From Coma Berenices (Perfect Paperback)
Like the legendary Swiss contactee, Billy Meier, Paul Villa was an unassuming gentleman of modest means who happened to capture some striking UFO photos. Villa had no axe to grind and no desire for publicity or fame. As so often happens in the world of UFO encounters, Villa did not find the flying saucer phenomenon, it found him.
Villa told UFO investigators that he would receive a telepathic message telling him to be at a certain location, usually somewhere near his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. When he arrived at the designated place, the alien ships would essentially "pose" for him while he took photos with a Japanese-made camera and standard Kodak color film.
The results of those efforts are a beautiful series of full color photos depicting the flying saucers in all their glory. Inner Light/Global Communications has recently released a new book called "The Secret Life of Paul Villa" that includes 20 pages of the very convincing photos as well as a fascinating background text by veteran UFO researcher Wendelle Stevens. Stevens makes a very strong case for the authenticity of the photos, noting the following features:
They are quite sharp, compared to most saucer photos seen up to that time (which was the 1960s through the early 1970s). Also, the image size of the saucer is large enough to show good detail without the extreme graininess that comes from enlarging the images. There is a series of photos, instead of just one photo, which provides more details for evaluation. Villa's truck is in the foreground of some of the photos, providing a known object with which to compare the size of the saucer and to judge its distance away. The degree of sharpness of other objects in the near foreground and clouds and trees in the distance indicates that that the object had to be very large in order to achieve the depth of field observed to exist in the photos, thereby ruling out the possibility that a small model may have been used to fake the photos.
Villa's photos first came to light when some of them were published by Gabriel Green in his "UFO International Journal" in October, 1965. The complete spread from that long ago publication is reproduced here in its entirety and is a charming bit of UFO history.
At the time, Villa's photos were greeted with some suspicion, even within the UFO community. Coral Lorenzon, who co-founded with her husband Jim the now defunct Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO), visited Villa at his home and asked him pointblank how he had faked the photos.
Villa responded sarcastically, "Well, my dear lady, you just make yourself a model and toss it into the air and photograph it."
Stevens adds that such a deception is not easily carried out. In fact, he tried doing it himself and by the third photo, his model was ruined. It was also impossible to get the model in the correct attitude and angle simply by tossing it up in front of the camera.
The working process and history of some of Villa's more dramatic photos is described in detail by Stevens, and his text is at all times both intelligent and cautious. But the real appeal of "The Secret Life of Paul Villa" is the photos themselves. The twenty pages of full color reproductions are breathtaking to look at and do appear to show actual flying saucers set against lovely desert scenery. Numerous black and white photos are also included throughout the book. There are different types of ships from photo to photo, which is a fact consistent with UFO witness accounts since the 1940s that has led some analysts to think we are being visited by several different alien races and civilizations. That theory also accounts for the many types of occupants reported, from the grays to the reptilians to the Nordics.
For Villa, the aliens were entirely human-looking, though more uniformly attractive than Earth people and definitely more refined in face and form. They took Villa on a tour of one of their saucers and confided in him that the whole galaxy to which Earth belongs is a grain of sand on a huge beach compared to the unfathomable number of inhabited bodies in the entire universe. They said their craft are constantly active over our planet and that they are here on a friendly mission to help Earth people.
Which is of course the same kind of contactee-meets-Space Brother experience that was earlier claimed by others like Howard Menger and George Adamksi, who also produced realistic-looking photos of UFOs that were universally debunked. There is one truism that is hard to get around when talking about such photos--any photo, even if it was later proven to be inarguably authentic, would quite naturally looked posed or faked. We have no absolute standard to judge such things by, no backlog of history to compare a real photo to. How could an actual photo look any different to the human eye than one that is cleverly faked?
And so we remain in a kind of limbo between truth and falsehood with regard to Villa's UFO photos or any others that have come down to us through the years. It is the classic situation where the individual must make up his own mind in lieu of any kind of authoritative, concrete verification. In any case, "The Secret Life of Paul Villa" is more than worth its purchase price for the thrill of seeing his many photos and pondering the mysteries the photos imply. "Truth," meanwhile, is for somewhere further down the line.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
interesting photos...dreadful editing, October 22, 2009
This review is from: The Secret Life Of Paul Villa: UFO Contact From Coma Berenices (Perfect Paperback)
This has to be the worst edited book I've seen in years. Almost every other page of this book has a misspelling, typo, or other error that is very irritating. That being said, I give it three stars for the photos. Most of them taken before PhotoShop and other software was available makes them quite impressive. Have had interest in this field for forty years but this was the first I had seen of many of these photos. For me, the photos alone made it worth it.
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1.0 out of 5 stars
DON'T PURCHASE THIS BOOK! Its only 87 pages long with horribly scanned photos! UNBELIEVABLE RIP-OFF!!, April 23, 2011
This review is from: The Secret Life Of Paul Villa: UFO Contact From Coma Berenices (Perfect Paperback)
I have to say that I am very disappointed in this book that I just received as a gift. I've read dozens and dozens of books on the subject of UFOs and this is one of the worst I've seen. Instead of just babbling on and on about how much I don't like this expensive "book" I will simply list the good and the bad.
Pros:
1.) Some new info about Paul Villa that I was not aware of.
2.) Several photos that were taken by Paul Villa that I had not seen.
Cons:
1.) Very expensive.
2.) This is not a book but is actually the size of a magazine. It reminds me of a textbook I might have read in High School and seems to be put together as flimsily.
3.) Numerous, obvious typos and misspellings. I counted 4 in the first 22 pages. Its unbelievable that this wasn't caught before it went to print. One good example is that the book uses the word "lie" when it should use the word "he". If you look at the 2 words they are similar in appearance. It makes me think that someone with an astigmatism proofread this!?
4.) Horrible scans! Articles taken directly from old newspapers and magazines. Couldn't they have been cleaned up a bit? Still, it was nice to read the original articles.
5) Grainy photos are replicated here! I own several books and magazines on UFOs and Paul Villa's photos are done better justice in them than in this book. Many look as if they were placed on a copy machine (which they probably were).
6.) This "book" is barely 100 pages! In fact, it's 105 pages long but the author counts the last 5 pages of ads for a total of 110 pages. He must've got worried when you looked at the total page count and thought it best to add 5 more.
7.) Lousy typeset. I hope thats the right word to use. What I mean is that the font used is large. There are pages where if you were to shrink the words down to a more reasonable size and combine a few pages that only have a few paragraphs on them, this book would be half the size!
8.) Color photos are ok. They could be better and I have a feeling its the cheap paper that they are printed on as well as a horrible scan. ALSO: The pages that have color photos on them have nothing on the reverse side! This may be because the printed words or other photos might've "bled" into its opposite page on the other side? I'm not sure since I'm not in the publishing business. My initial feelings are that this was done to increase the page count. There are actually 23 pages of color photographs (including the photo of Paul) which means there are 23 pages that are blank. Subtract that from the 110 page total (don't forget there are 5 pages of ads) and you have a book that is 82 pages long! Unbelievable.
Well I'm done ranting. If I haven't convinced you to NOT buy this book then you haven't been paying attention. I sure wish one of the other Reviewers would've given this info to the public and saved me $40!
If you have any questions or comments please leave them and I will respond.
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