Customer Reviews

Strange World

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No other single book in print will give the beginning paranormal researcher a better overall view of the field. Also can be an eye opener for the experienced hand who has only read the "specialty" titles of recent years. The companion titles "Stranger than Science" and "Strangest of All" will complete a thorough overview of the subject

The work of Frank Edwards sets the stage as the original X-Files -- i.e., investigating amazing, fascinating information and reports of the paranormal and the otherworldly. He was a truly fascinating man and a friend of the family who would come over to the house for dinner with my parents. I was very young, but I still remember him, and I still have a paperback book collection of amateur magic tricks he brought me once. I cannot recommend his books too highly - I read them over and over when I was young, and I still go back to them today.

Innuendo and partial discussion are the strategy of the pseudo-scientist, and no one has been better at it than Frank Edwards. I am well aware that there are many unknown wonders in the world that science has as yet failed to discover and if it has been discovered, has yet to explain it. Therefore, there are things that are unknown and some of them are no doubt quite bizarre.

With this background, there is a grain of truth in much of what Edwards reports in this book. However, in nearly all cases, there is only a grain and once that grain is exceeded, he enters the area of absurdity. Now that Internet search engines such as Google exist, it is relatively easy to debunk much of what Edwards writes.

I read this book with fascination in my youth and was astounded. However, when my curiosity led me to further investigation, it became clear very quickly that the contents of this book were dramatic conclusions based on simplistic reasoning from weak initial premises. To see that simple read the blurb on the back cover

The sensational book that reveals the unbelievable!

Terrifying events that have baffled the most brilliant scientific minds!

I would like to describe what I believe accounts for the origin of many claims of supernatural, psychic, occult, or new age phenomena. In the early 1960s a story was circulated and published to the effect that a satellite had been recovered from earth orbit and was found to be steadily losing weight due to its exposure to outer space. The story made the rounds of the Fortean literature of the time and can be found today in Frank Edward's book STRANGE WORLD (item 80: Weight loss in space).

I believe that I was able to piece together the genesis of this tale and I think that it is probably typical of such literature. During the 1960s a number of the "Discoverer" series of satellites were recovered from orbit. Their satellites were launched on Thor-Agena rockets from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, were flown in polar orbits, and were being developed for reconnaissance purposes. In describing the flights the government quoted masses in orbit which sometimes included the spent final rocket stage (named "Agena"). Only a portion of the satellite was brought down from orbit and an even smaller package remained after retro rockets and reentry heat shield were removed. This descending list of masses appeared in popular press accounts of the Discoverer satellites, usually with no explanation of the seemingly selfcontradictory values.

To this day accounts of spaceflight often times incorrectly describe objects in earth orbit as having no weight. (Apparent weightlessness is described correctly in College Physics by Wilson, et al, 6th edition, page 244, Prentice-Hall 2007.) Scientifically naive readers of the accounts of the recovery of capsules from Discoverer satellites then jumped to the conclusion that the satellites had somehow become "infected" by this strange property of weightlessness acquired while in space.

I have examined a number of items from the pseudo-scientific literature and believe that this account may be a fairly typical example.