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Creatures of the Outer Edge
Book by Clark, Jerome
239 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1978
28 people want to read
About the author
Jerome Clark
65 books26 followersJerome Clark is an American researcher and writer, specializing in unidentified flying objects and other anomalous phenomena; he is also a songwriter of some note.
Clark is one of the most prominent UFO historians and researchers active today. Although Clark's works have sometimes generated spirited debate, he is widely regarded as one of the most reputable writers in the field, and he has earned the praise of many skeptics. Clark's works have been cited in multiple articles in the debunking-oriented Skeptical Inquirer. Despite the fact that most contributors to the British periodical Magonia disagree with Clark's endorsement of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, they have nonetheless consulted his books for their articles, and have described his works as "invaluable" and described him as one of "ufology's finest" and as "highly-respected." The skeptical RRGroup describes Clark as a rare "Bona fide UFO researcher." In his Saucer Smear, longtime ufologist James W. Moseley writes that Clark "is acknowledged ... as the UFO Field's leading historian."[
Clark is also a prominently featured talking head on made-for-television UFO documentaries, most notably the 2005 prime-time U.S. television special Peter Jennings Reporting: UFOs — Seeing Is Believing, discussing the early history of the U.S. Military's UFO investigations (see also Project Sign and Project Grudge.) In addition to the Peter Jennings special, Clark has also appeared on episodes of NBC's Unsolved Mysteries television series and on the syndicated television series Sightings. In 1997 he was prominently featured on the A&E Network's documentary "Where Are All the UFOs?", which examined the history of the UFO phenomenon.
Clark is one of the most prominent UFO historians and researchers active today. Although Clark's works have sometimes generated spirited debate, he is widely regarded as one of the most reputable writers in the field, and he has earned the praise of many skeptics. Clark's works have been cited in multiple articles in the debunking-oriented Skeptical Inquirer. Despite the fact that most contributors to the British periodical Magonia disagree with Clark's endorsement of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, they have nonetheless consulted his books for their articles, and have described his works as "invaluable" and described him as one of "ufology's finest" and as "highly-respected." The skeptical RRGroup describes Clark as a rare "Bona fide UFO researcher." In his Saucer Smear, longtime ufologist James W. Moseley writes that Clark "is acknowledged ... as the UFO Field's leading historian."[
Clark is also a prominently featured talking head on made-for-television UFO documentaries, most notably the 2005 prime-time U.S. television special Peter Jennings Reporting: UFOs — Seeing Is Believing, discussing the early history of the U.S. Military's UFO investigations (see also Project Sign and Project Grudge.) In addition to the Peter Jennings special, Clark has also appeared on episodes of NBC's Unsolved Mysteries television series and on the syndicated television series Sightings. In 1997 he was prominently featured on the A&E Network's documentary "Where Are All the UFOs?", which examined the history of the UFO phenomenon.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 10, 2019
OLD REVIEW: I loved books like this when I was a kid. There were only so many ways you could write yet another paperback about UFOS or Bigfoot, so writers like Clark, Loren Coleman, John A. Keel and Janet Bord & Colin Bord tapped into the high-weirdness of the 70s, with a flavoring dash of Charles Fort, and came up with oddball, visionary explorations of the weirdest of the weird - Bigfoots seen entering flying saucers or exploding in a flash of light when shot with shotguns, lake monsters that were transparent in headlights, 3-eyed whatsits, frog-people under bridges, and on and on. Really helped bend my mind in profitably imaginative ways.
NEW REVIEW: my bedtime reading down the meandering path of outré Fortean books took me here after catching up with some later Loren Coleman works (Mysterious America, Curious Encounters: Phantom Trains, Spooky Spots and Other Mysterious Wonders, Tom Slick and the Search for the Yeti). As I've said in other reviews, I was a bit of a connoisseur of books on the unexplained when I was a kid (thanks to my accidental discovery of Charles Fort when I was in Fourth Grade), and quickly tired of your run-of-the-mill Bigfoot, UFO and lake/sea monster books. The field itself, by the 70s, was also a bit tired of endlessly assembling reports of things people *might* have seen and writing up concluding chapters that basically shrug and say "who knows?" or spin some crazy theory with no proof. Along came people like John Keel, Jerome Clark & Loren Coleman - devoted Forteans who felt as if the field they loved was now hampered by locked-in ideas - whether it be nuts-and-bolts spaceships, primitive ape-men maintaining unlikely breeding populations in well-traveled wilderness, or relict plesiosaurs clinging to life in deep, cold lake bottoms. These writers began thinking outside the box, looking for data and reports which had been "damned" (ie: excluded - as from Fort's The Book of the Damned) - but *not* by scientists (in these specific cases) but rather by other researchers into strange phenomena, essentially damning the cases that did not fit their "pet theory." And, as it was, the fields of paranormal investigation were undergoing a sea-change at the time anyway, as the 70s ushered in the era of "high weirdness."
And so you get odd books like this - an examination of various creature reports, but the oddest of the odd - Bigfoots and UFOs seen together, Men In Black reports coinciding with poltergeist phenomena, frog-men and lizard men and wolf-men, black cats and giant birds accompanied by strange lights, huge black dogs that disappear in thin air. If you are marshaling your rational arguments against bone-headed credulity and the unreliability of eye-witnesses, you are missing the fun and imaginative point!
The authors begin modestly - by pointing out the wide variety of toe-counts and sizes of Bigfoot tracks (tying it into the contemporary observation that given the wide range of types of described occupants sighted in, on or near UFOS, we're likely visited by thousands of different planets) and positing that no actual living creature could fit the variety, then pointing out the various folkloric and historic reports that show Bigfoot in an "immaterial"/"spirit creature" light. From there, it's a vast relation of all kinds of strange creatures sighted over the last few centuries, with the underlying point being that ALL OF THIS - essentially everything strange - seem to be related in many ways, even if completely different on the surface. While later books by Coleman would postulate the possibility of actual, biological relict species like the "North American Ape", or consider the idea that certain species may, when placed under environmental duress, exhibit a form of spontaneous atavism (wherein long lost traits re-appear in small clusters) - there is none of that zoological/scientific bet-hedging here (although the big birds, it is argued, do seem to follow a migratory pattern).
Instead, while the book teases an "interpretation" (not an answer, mind you, as if such a thing were possible) the wrap-up is probably the weakest part. Oh the idea, as read by a very-young me, was certainly heady stuff and led me down different avenues of exploration, but the authors, honestly, make a botch of stating it clearly. Essentially, what they're positing is that all these reports of creatures and lights and such are projections from the Jungian shared unconscious - wild men and wild animals of the past, flying ships and aliens of the projected future, with sprinklings of the usual phantasmagoria that have haunted the human mind since before Hieronymus Bosch. And, further (although this is not explicated that well, but presumably, by default), that the "nature of reality" is such that sometimes these "projections" (given the right psychological, temporal, social or geographical circumstances) can take on actual, short-lived tangible form, interacting with the real world for a time before dissipating back into the ether.
Something of a poetic theory, surely, which certainly informed my still-to-come readings into occultism to no end, I assure you. As a model it is both absurd and ambitious (for example - easily explaining why anomalous flying objects often resemble the contemporary "conception" of what a flying craft would look like - from Roman reports of "flying shields" to the 1890's Jules-Verne looking airships that cruised American skies, to flying discs plucked from the covers of pulp magazines [note: the initial Kenneth Arnold 1947 report that kicked off the "Flying Saucer craze" described crescent shaped craft, not saucer-shaped - it was their motion that was described as resembling "saucers skipped across the water"] and on to our ultra-sleek, hyper-transforming other-dimensional craft sited today) but it is a model so ambitious that providing proof seems unlikely, as it brings into question the very nature of reality and our consciousness' effect on it. Still, it *is* yet another way to frame these strange phenomena.
Anyway, this is a lot of fun. Any book that gives me isolated reports of wolfmen, lizardmen and Sasquatch wearing checkered shirts, is entertaining reading! Oddly, while I feel the urge to pursue this area further and plunge into John Keel, I believe I will instead detour back out to inexplicable, (but purely natural) anomalous phenomena as a balancing move - material as to be found in William Corliss' Handbook of Unusual Natural Phenomena, another favorite of my youth - as I find that "high weirdness", while compelling, proves a rich dessert of chocolate mousse which one can easily over-do.
NEW REVIEW: my bedtime reading down the meandering path of outré Fortean books took me here after catching up with some later Loren Coleman works (Mysterious America, Curious Encounters: Phantom Trains, Spooky Spots and Other Mysterious Wonders, Tom Slick and the Search for the Yeti). As I've said in other reviews, I was a bit of a connoisseur of books on the unexplained when I was a kid (thanks to my accidental discovery of Charles Fort when I was in Fourth Grade), and quickly tired of your run-of-the-mill Bigfoot, UFO and lake/sea monster books. The field itself, by the 70s, was also a bit tired of endlessly assembling reports of things people *might* have seen and writing up concluding chapters that basically shrug and say "who knows?" or spin some crazy theory with no proof. Along came people like John Keel, Jerome Clark & Loren Coleman - devoted Forteans who felt as if the field they loved was now hampered by locked-in ideas - whether it be nuts-and-bolts spaceships, primitive ape-men maintaining unlikely breeding populations in well-traveled wilderness, or relict plesiosaurs clinging to life in deep, cold lake bottoms. These writers began thinking outside the box, looking for data and reports which had been "damned" (ie: excluded - as from Fort's The Book of the Damned) - but *not* by scientists (in these specific cases) but rather by other researchers into strange phenomena, essentially damning the cases that did not fit their "pet theory." And, as it was, the fields of paranormal investigation were undergoing a sea-change at the time anyway, as the 70s ushered in the era of "high weirdness."
And so you get odd books like this - an examination of various creature reports, but the oddest of the odd - Bigfoots and UFOs seen together, Men In Black reports coinciding with poltergeist phenomena, frog-men and lizard men and wolf-men, black cats and giant birds accompanied by strange lights, huge black dogs that disappear in thin air. If you are marshaling your rational arguments against bone-headed credulity and the unreliability of eye-witnesses, you are missing the fun and imaginative point!
The authors begin modestly - by pointing out the wide variety of toe-counts and sizes of Bigfoot tracks (tying it into the contemporary observation that given the wide range of types of described occupants sighted in, on or near UFOS, we're likely visited by thousands of different planets) and positing that no actual living creature could fit the variety, then pointing out the various folkloric and historic reports that show Bigfoot in an "immaterial"/"spirit creature" light. From there, it's a vast relation of all kinds of strange creatures sighted over the last few centuries, with the underlying point being that ALL OF THIS - essentially everything strange - seem to be related in many ways, even if completely different on the surface. While later books by Coleman would postulate the possibility of actual, biological relict species like the "North American Ape", or consider the idea that certain species may, when placed under environmental duress, exhibit a form of spontaneous atavism (wherein long lost traits re-appear in small clusters) - there is none of that zoological/scientific bet-hedging here (although the big birds, it is argued, do seem to follow a migratory pattern).
Instead, while the book teases an "interpretation" (not an answer, mind you, as if such a thing were possible) the wrap-up is probably the weakest part. Oh the idea, as read by a very-young me, was certainly heady stuff and led me down different avenues of exploration, but the authors, honestly, make a botch of stating it clearly. Essentially, what they're positing is that all these reports of creatures and lights and such are projections from the Jungian shared unconscious - wild men and wild animals of the past, flying ships and aliens of the projected future, with sprinklings of the usual phantasmagoria that have haunted the human mind since before Hieronymus Bosch. And, further (although this is not explicated that well, but presumably, by default), that the "nature of reality" is such that sometimes these "projections" (given the right psychological, temporal, social or geographical circumstances) can take on actual, short-lived tangible form, interacting with the real world for a time before dissipating back into the ether.
Something of a poetic theory, surely, which certainly informed my still-to-come readings into occultism to no end, I assure you. As a model it is both absurd and ambitious (for example - easily explaining why anomalous flying objects often resemble the contemporary "conception" of what a flying craft would look like - from Roman reports of "flying shields" to the 1890's Jules-Verne looking airships that cruised American skies, to flying discs plucked from the covers of pulp magazines [note: the initial Kenneth Arnold 1947 report that kicked off the "Flying Saucer craze" described crescent shaped craft, not saucer-shaped - it was their motion that was described as resembling "saucers skipped across the water"] and on to our ultra-sleek, hyper-transforming other-dimensional craft sited today) but it is a model so ambitious that providing proof seems unlikely, as it brings into question the very nature of reality and our consciousness' effect on it. Still, it *is* yet another way to frame these strange phenomena.
Anyway, this is a lot of fun. Any book that gives me isolated reports of wolfmen, lizardmen and Sasquatch wearing checkered shirts, is entertaining reading! Oddly, while I feel the urge to pursue this area further and plunge into John Keel, I believe I will instead detour back out to inexplicable, (but purely natural) anomalous phenomena as a balancing move - material as to be found in William Corliss' Handbook of Unusual Natural Phenomena, another favorite of my youth - as I find that "high weirdness", while compelling, proves a rich dessert of chocolate mousse which one can easily over-do.
Displaying 1 of 1 review