Customer Reviews

Secrets of the Mysterious Valley

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

 

 

...my God, what happened to editing? I have never read such a poorly edited book in my life. Misspelled words abound, there are single letters stuck in the middle of sentences, as well as repeated sentences and paragraphs. There are even sentences that make absolutely no sense in the context of the paragraph in which they are located or that are missing such basic requirements as a subject or verb. An occasional error can be expected, but these errors appear on page after page.

In addition to errors in composition, the manuscript was poorly edited for tightness. For example, how many times in the space of two pages do we have to be told that Laurance Rockefeller has a degree in philosophy from Princeton. We get it, already. Move on.

This is the third book published by APU that I have read and it will be the last. The first two had more than their share of errors, but this one takes the cake. There are plenty of interesting books out there to be read that are comprehensible.

That said, once you manage to wade through the terrible editing, there are some interesting stories in the book. Mr. O'Brien has a refreshing way of looking at things, and a very sensible way of investigating what is virtually uninvestigatable (is that a word?). He shows a real, logical concern for problems such as the investigator interjecting himself into the subject under investigation, which shows a level of thought and analysis that few investigators of the unknown are intelligent enough to develop. I just wish that someone had taken the time to give his manuscript the editing that it so obviously needed and deserved. If you are truly interested in the subject, read the book, but be prepared for hours of frustration just trying to decipher what Mr. O'Brien is trying to communicate. If you just want an overview of the mysterious San Luis Valley, read one of Mr. O'Brien's earlier, far more readable books.

As a half-time resident of the San Luis Valley (the "Mysterious Valley" of the title) in south central Colorado, I have followed and appreciated Chris O'Brien's work for several years. Unlike many professional journalists who write about anomalous phenomena such as UFOs and Unusual Animal Deaths, O'Brien sticks with the facts and avoids sensationalizing or promoting unwarranted inferences. He is not a "believer" searching for support but rather an open eyed, intelligent, and often courageous student of inexplicable, mysterious events that occur here in our isolated valley at a rate and with a bizarre intensity and long history perhaps unmatched any other place in the world. Like in the first two books focused on the "Valley," O'Brien presents himself as narrator on the ground learning as he goes, inspired, frustrated at times, devoted to trying to understand, constantly working to widen his frame of reference so as to not distort objective observation. It's a true picture, beautifully told, one bound to stimulate more realistic thinking about what is really going on here. Five cheers! Keep up the good work!!!

After reading Christopher O'Briens first two excellent books, The Mysterious Valley and Enter the Valley, I eagerly awaited his third promised book.

Upon recently reading Secrets of the Mysterious Valley, I found it to be a rehash of the same material in his first two books. On one hand this was very disappointing to me, yet on the other it was good to see all the material meshed together, especially since it had been awhile since I read the first two books. There is very little new information here, which the reader will find at some point is partly due to the author's moving from the valley to Sedona in I believe 2001. He still keeps in touch with a group of "watchers" in the valley who report to him.

While the content is fascinating, this has to be one of the most poorly edited books I have ever read. We have much repetition within the book itself, run-on sentences, missing words that leave one with the need to interpret the author's meaning, extra words, sentences with words that are run together, too much punctuation, too little punctuation, different typefaces that do not appear to be deliberate, a repeated portion of a chapter, some photos that are not addressed within the chapter where they are placed, word forms used incorrectly, words and names not spelled correctly, and etcetera, etcetara, etcetera, as the King of Siam would say. With that run-on sentence of my own, I will leave other readers to find the rest of the errors.

I am not saying don't buy this book, especially if you have not read the first two, but hopefully there will be a new edition available that is properly edited. I think Christopher O'Brien's diligent work and research into the anomolous happenings in the San Luis Valley is laudable and I hope to see another book from him on the strange happenings in the Sedona area.

As one final note, the book gives no credit to the artist of the cover design, which I find very intriguing.

And as a second final note, there are two websites listed in the book, one of which give updates on the happenings in the San Luis Valley. I find this very helpful as when I read the first two books I could not find any website for Christopher O'Brien.

This is an interesting book but the author does not know the proper usage of "a" or "an". The author would have written..This is a interesting book.

The San Luis Valley (SLV) is in the USA. It runs from south central Colorado into northern New Mexico, and has been the setting for numerous cattle mutilations, UFO sightings, and other oddities over the years. Having lived in the area and actively investigated cases there, Christopher O'Brien is well-placed to write about the region's anomalous events. 'Secrets of the Mysterious Valley' is his third book about the area.

Military activity may have been the source of many of the UFO sightings in the SLV. O'Brien explains that the 70-square-mile La Veta Military Operations Area is located just east of the SLV, and is used for low-level flight training. And he notes that there has been speculation about the presence of one or more secret bases in the Colorado/New Mexico border area. He relates (p. 285) that an investigator told him about seeing a large door open somewhere in the Rio Grande Canyon. A concrete pad extended out from the opening, and a helicopter flew off from it. The pad then retracted and the doors closed. (O'Brien's quotation from the anonymous source contains an inconsistency - it refers to a 'door' that opened, but 'doors' that closed.)

However, if they occurred as described, some of the UFO events reported from the SLV don't seem easy to explain in terms of military activity. A man called Alan, who lived near the mouth of the Rio Grande Canyon, informed O'Brien that throughout the spring of 1994, he and his family had seen "every kind of ship you can imagine" flying around near to where they lived. Some were discs, some were triangles; some were big, and others were small. Some of them gave off red and blue flashes. And Alan's mother had allegedly discovered that the craft would come closer if she called to them mentally. Alan told O'Brien about an incident that had occurred one evening towards the end of May of that year. He was with a friend who didn't believe that Alan and his family had seen these craft. As they sat in the friend's pick-up truck at a remote spot a couple of miles north of the ranch, a strange bank of fog rolled in and surrounded them. They saw a light ahead, and a craft appeared and hovered in front of them, some 200 yards away. Alan called it closer, and it approached them. When it got to about 50 feet away, it "just sat there" (Alan's words, quoted by O'Brien). According to Alan, his friend "kind of freaked out" and fired two shots at the object with a rifle. The UFO went above the truck, somehow lifted it up, and then deposited it in a ditch!

Much of the book deals with the animal mutilation phenomenon, although O'Brien prefers the term 'unusual animal deaths' (UADs) to 'mutilations'. In fact, he thinks that many UAD cases, but by no means all, may represent the work of scavengers. There was a wave of cases in the SLV in 1975-78, although there's reason to suspect that human perpetrators were responsible for at least some of them. O'Brien notes, for example, that some of the mutilated cattle had been shot with firearms. But there had been unusual animal deaths in the area before the 1970s. For instance, in September 1967, a three-year-old horse, called 'Lady', was found lying on her left side in a meadow, with all the tissue from her shoulders to the tip of her nose missing, and with the exposed bones glistening, bleached white, as if they had been in the sun for many years. The eyes, tongue, oesophagus, windpipe and brain were missing. There had apparently been UFO sightings in the weeks preceding her death. There have been further unusual animal deaths in the area since the 1970s, and after moving to the valley at the end of the 1980s, O'Brien personally investigated or researched many cases.

O'Brien refers to speculation that mutilations have been carried out for purposes of environmental or biological monitoring (e.g. to gauge the presence of prion disease in animals that humans eat). However, one might wonder why it would be necessary to engage in unlawful killing of livestock in order to obtain biological samples. If some sort of government agency were involved, wouldn't it be a lot easier for it to buy cattle from ranchers, or to maintain herds of its own? Of course, another suggestion is that aliens have carried out mutilations, in order to obtain biological material. But why would they leave evidence of their depredations scattered about, thereby drawing attention to their activity?

O'Brien (pp. 427-428) states that a man called Wayne Holland claims to have been a member of US Army Intelligence and to have been involved in animal mutilations in Indiana and Illinois between 1973 and 1975. "[S]aucer-shaped aerial platforms" were allegedly used, with Holland being responsible for logging data while others removed cattle parts. The aim was ostensibly to discover why other - unexplained - animal deaths were occurring. However, it's not clear to me how mutilating cattle would achieve that objective. It is, of course, possible that members of mutilation teams weren't told the real reason for these procedures. O'Brien states that other members of covert government mutilation teams are beginning to come forward. If so, further information may emerge in due course.

There's something grimly theatrical about animal mutilations. But maybe that's intentional. Imagine, for example, that the authorities wanted to conceal the testing of top secret or prototype aircraft in an area. One way might be to encourage the local populace to attribute sightings of unusual aerial craft to extraterrestrial aliens. Conducting animal mutilations thereabouts could be a ruse to reinforce the belief that the UFO sightings were caused by aliens. But that could backfire - by drawing attention to the area.

O'Brien considers the possibility that mutilations are perpetrated by members of occult groups. He refers (pp. 413-414) to a 5,000-acre ranch located in New Mexico, just below the Colorado border, and states that it has been the setting for upwards of 50 unexplained cattle death reports since 1993. He observes that in several instances in the early 1990s, occult-based ritual signs were reportedly found in the vicinity of the mutilated animals, although he notes that the discovery of "occult evidence" at sites of cattle mutilations is extremely rare. But later in his book (p. 430), he mentions a claim that a congressional committee had "smoking-gun evidence" linking mutilations with a ritual group that had access to military hardware. Human sacrifice was allegedly preferable to the group, but it targeted livestock (mainly cattle) because so many human sacrifices would eventually come to notice. But it's not clear from this whether the group is supposed to have sacrificed both humans and livestock, or just the latter. The information came to O'Brien third-hand, and he doesn't name his informant or his informant's source. Accordingly, it's hard to know how much credence to give this report.

O'Brien (p. 415) notes that the livestock sector is one of the most significant contributors to our global environmental problems, and he refers (p. 426) to the notion that the mutilation phenomenon is somehow being manifested by the "collective unconscious", perhaps as a warning to us. Arguably, though, if we're being given a warning, it's not a very clear one, and it doesn't appear to be very effective!

O'Brien contends (p. 431) that there has always been something awesome and powerful happening in the SLV and certain other locations in the western hemisphere. He asks whether the SLV could be a "sacrificial altar", and he suggests that the US government has at least some knowledge of "this predatory 'presence'", and may be engaged in appeasing, emulating, and studying it. Confusingly, though, he goes on to refer to the "power elite, the hidden control structure on our planet" (p. 432) - which sounds like a reference to a secret world government. He speculates that it may have made a bargain with the "ancient presence", and may be conducting ritual blood sacrifice to placate it and/or keep it at bay!

In addition to unusual animal deaths and UFOs, O'Brien mentions various other anomalous phenomena. For example, he states (pp. 269-270) that several utility poles in the area sporadically vibrate during periods of UFO sightings, and he relates that a researcher called Gary Hart tape-recorded sounds from a vibrating pole on 30th June 1994. There was apparently no wind that night, and the sound seemed to come from the ground. This happened five miles south of a spot from which two triangular-shaped UFOs had been seen a few nights before.

Although the content is interesting, O'Brien's book is marred by misspellings, badly constructed sentences, and printing errors (e.g. words appearing with no spaces between them). Running to well over 400 pages, it deals with serious and intriguing matters, but it lacks an index, which it badly needs. And although it was published quite recently (2007), it says very little about what has, or hasn't, been happening in the SLV since the 1990s. For these reasons, I can't give the book more than three stars, although I'd recommend it to anyone with an interest in anomaly hot spots.

The San Luis Valley was my childhood home until I joined the Navy. Having lived in Alamosa, Colo for that important part of my life, I have many memories of the strangeness of events even then and experienced more than my share. I am glad it continues to this day. I knew of many of the things mentioned in the book, but learned of so many things I had never known.