After many problems with the US post office the copy of Nick Redfern's book "Contactees: A History of Alien-Human Interaction," that he so very kindly sent me, finally arrived; and I've just finished reading it. I have no expertise in doing a book review so these are just my thoughts; the things that occurred to me as I was reading. I began by sending Nick my thoughts and he suggested that I do a Blog Post, so here it is. Those familiar with the articles on my website will know that I like to take a rather unconventional angle on things.Having read the first few chapter I was starting to think that he should have called the book "Californian Contactees," given how many took place in that State. And I noted how often the Contactees seemed to describe their contacts as being similar to the things that were current in their own lives. For example, Adamski had meetings with hippy-type beings, whereas Truman Bethurum woke to find himself surrounded by beings wearing uniforms and black-billed caps. As he was working as a maintenance mechanic on a road construtcion site I wondered if his fellow workers also wore uniforms of some type.Reading about Orfeo Angelucci seeming to have a panic attack just before he found himself undergoing a contact reminded me of my own panic attacks. One such put me into the Oz Factor state of mind. I was walking home along a road in the middle of town, during the late afternoon, when I became aware that I couldn't actually hear the traffic passing me by, and things seemed to be totally unreal. But I didn't have any contact experience!However, back to the book. As I read on I found myself thinking about the Name Game, so here are the things that stood out for me in that regard:- Mr. Janus and Prince Philip's equerry - it suddenly occurred to me that Janus was also the name of a god in Roman mythology. He was the god of entrances and beginnings and endings. Normally he was shown as having two faces, or heads, facing in opposite directions.- The story of the Maier sisters reminded me of Billy Meier; spelt differently but perhaps pronounced the same.- How many of those early Contactees had the same Christian name of George: Adamski and Hunt Williamson, Van Tassel, and Geroge King.Until I read Nick's conclusions in his final chapter, many of which I agree with, I found myself wondering why so many of them thought they were interacting with being from Venus or, occasionally, other planets in our own Solar System. Even today, for some people, there's still a belief that beings live on Venus, but as spiritual entities who live in the planet's atmosphere.Relating the experiences of Dana Howard, a quote from Regan Lee says that Diane is a version of the name Diana. Of course, Diana, is also the goddess of the hunt, associated with wild animals and woodlands, as well as being associated with the Moon. Regan adds that Venus represents: " the female sex, fertility, beauty, love." And in many of those Contactee stories Venus also seems to represent the sexual side of that idea with all those men meeting beautiful Venusian women!The tale of what Villas Boas said happened to him is well known, but what struck me was the part where he described being covered with a "gel-like substance" when he was first taken aboard the craft. I was immediately reminded of the gel we use these days to disinfect our hands, particularly in places such as hospitals, when access to soap and water isn't available.Another very famous UFO story is that of Lonnie Zamora, and his description of the marking he saw on the craft. He said that it was a red marking shaped like a crescent with a vertical arrow and a horizontal line beneath. I found part of that depiction to be reminiscent of the sign of an arrow pointing upwards which is, apparently, the sign from the ground-to-air emergency code meaning: "I/we proceed in this direction." However, there are also reports that the insignia was actually more akin to what could be described as two letters A, one inside the other, with several horizontal bars disecting them.While talking of symbols, I was interested in the case of patrolman Herbert Schirmer. He stated that, on the Ufonaut's uniform, he saw the insignia of a Winged Serpent. Unfortunately it isn't clear if this was a representation of some animal, or that of the Caduceus. But, if was akin the to the Caduceus, which is what came to my mind as I read about it, then I found that fascinating. In ancient Greece the god Mercury was represented by Hermes. He was the fleet footed messenger of the gods, and his symbol was the caduceus, the staff of the two snakes. And in ancient Rome, Hermes was not only the god of merchants but also of thieves; and the symbol became that of traders. More importantly, it also became the symbol of communication. For those of us with an interest in astrology we know that when Mercury is retrograde clear communcation can suffer. And, to return for a moment to the insignia that Lonnie Zamora described, if he actually saw the double A with the horizontal bars across it, then in alchemy, where mercury was thought to have been used, it represented an amalgam.A furhter connection that came to mind was when reading about Vorilhon, who became Ra"el, and started the Ra"elian. He seems to have based his ideas on his early Catholic childhood. Not only did he use the name Yahweh, meaning God, but the english title of his book: "The Book Which Tells the Truth" could in many ways be interchangeable with what many belive to the be Truth as The Bible tells it. He even used the term Elohim for the alient scientists he purportedly met. In the Hebrew Bible the word Elohim is translated as God, but in the English Bible the translation usually refers to gods, i.e. pagan deities, and God when meaning the God of Israel. I was also struck by the fact that both Ra"el and Applewhite, from the Heaven's Gate Cult had, at one time, careers based around music, and both had religious backgrounds.To return to Billy Meier, he said that one of the Contacts was Quetzal. That, of course, is the first part of the name Quetzalcoatl, a Mesoamerican deity. Quetzalcoatl was a god, often depicted as a white man, who's name meant light, the shining one. He was believed to have brought civilization to Mesoamerica. In the iconography he is depicted as a feathered, or possibly winged, serpent.And here's one final name-game: Nick writes that Maury coined the term Hypnagogia in the 1800s, although the state already had a very long hisotry. That reminded me of the Maury Island Incident, in June 1947 three days before Kenneth Arnold had his famous sighting. I've even had the conditon myself sometimes. On one occasion I heard an animal growl and "knew" a large cat was outside my bedroom door!If anything that I've written makes you want to read this book then you can buy a copy of it at Amazon in either the US or the UK. Personally, having been a follower of Ufology for many decades now, there were few Contactee cases that I didn't know about, but it was good to be able to refresh my memory as I'd forgotten so much about them. It's also great that younger generations can also read about them. I think we tend to forget where so much of Ufology began in modern era. And, finally, as I was reading I also noted how many of the current New Age ideas seem to have their roots in what these early Contactees said. For the early Contactees it was about peace and the dangers of nuclear war, now it's about ecology and climate change. Always the things that seem to worry us most.
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