Customer Reviews

The Ufo Casebook: Startling Cases and Astonishing Photographs of Encounters With Flying Saucers (The Unexplained)

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This is yet another hardcover, double-columned, magazine-style colour illustrated volume from the 1980s claiming to be a UFO casebook. Edited by Peter Brookesmith and with a short foreword by Hilary Evans, the essays are all written by Charles Bowen of the once excellent but now unfortunately defunct British publication "Flying Saucer Review". Bowen cherry-picks some of the most compelling cases from the previous 40 years and writes a mostly literate and competent summary of each.

The book runs to 82 pages and examines mainly well-known cases from around the world, plus some less well-known ones mainly from the UK. Each case write-up is illustrated by either monochrome photos or artists' colour illustrations, or both. The chapters on the Villas-Boas and the Pascagoula abduction cases in particular are quite thorough and accurate to the facts.

Like Spencer's casebook from the same period, this offering would be a reasonable primer for the reader unacquainted with the UFO phenomenon. Reading it however is unlikely to add to the reader's knowledge unless it's the first time they have approached the subject - in which case, it would be OK.

Time has moved on and there is better reading out there on this phenomenon, though the book is probably worth having in the library as a curiosity, and for the illustrations. Those in Spencer's book, however, are much better.

This is yet another hardcover, double-columned, magazine-style colour illustrated volume from the 1980s claiming to be a UFO casebook. Edited by Peter Brookesmith and with a short foreword by Hilary Evans, the essays are all written by Charles Bowen of the once excellent but now unfortunately defunct British publication "Flying Saucer Review". Bowen cherry-picks some of the most compelling cases from the previous 40 years and writes a mostly literate and competent summary of each.

The book runs to 82 pages and examines mainly well-known cases from around the world, plus some less well-known ones mainly from the UK. Each case write-up is illustrated by either monochrome photos or artists' colour illustrations, or both. The chapters on the Villas-Boas and the Pascagoula abduction cases in particular are quite thorough and accurate to the facts.

Like Spencer's casebook from the same period, this offering would be a reasonable primer for the reader unacquainted with the UFO phenomenon. Reading it however is unlikely to add to the reader's knowledge unless it's the first time they have approached the subject - in which case, it would be OK.

Time has moved on and there is better reading out there on this phenomenon, though the book is probably worth having in the library as a curiosity, and for the illustrations. Those in Spencer's book, however, are much better.