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Alien Contact: The First Fifty Years
s/t: An Up-To-The-Minute Report By The World's Leading Ufologist
"With the news media treating UFO sightings as a big joke, self-appointed experts pontificating on the topic...and bizarre stories circulating...it's no wonder that people...are often confused and cynical. But the UFO phenomenon...does offer genuine mysteries, and...Randles' latest book is a good place to start. One or two cases for each year from 1947-1997 are summarized and illustrated, with insightful commentary from the author. Such famous incidents as the Roswell crash...are described, as well as sightings that have received little or no airplay...Randles maintains a balanced perspective throughout.—Booklist. 144 pages (all in color), 7 3/8 X 9 3/4.
"With the news media treating UFO sightings as a big joke, self-appointed experts pontificating on the topic...and bizarre stories circulating...it's no wonder that people...are often confused and cynical. But the UFO phenomenon...does offer genuine mysteries, and...Randles' latest book is a good place to start. One or two cases for each year from 1947-1997 are summarized and illustrated, with insightful commentary from the author. Such famous incidents as the Roswell crash...are described, as well as sightings that have received little or no airplay...Randles maintains a balanced perspective throughout.—Booklist. 144 pages (all in color), 7 3/8 X 9 3/4.
144 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
35 people want to read
About the author
Jenny Randles
66 books31 followersBritish author and former director of investigations with the British UFO Research Association (BUFORA), serving in that role from 1982 through to 1994.
Randles specializes in writing books on UFOs and paranormal phenomena. To date 50 of these have been published, ranging from her first UFOs: A British Viewpoint (1979) to Breaking the Time Barrier: The race to build the first time machine (2005). Subjects covered include crop circles, ESP, life after death, time anomalies and spontaneous human combustion.
Randles specializes in writing books on UFOs and paranormal phenomena. To date 50 of these have been published, ranging from her first UFOs: A British Viewpoint (1979) to Breaking the Time Barrier: The race to build the first time machine (2005). Subjects covered include crop circles, ESP, life after death, time anomalies and spontaneous human combustion.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 28, 2021
Note: This review is for the book titled "Alien Contact" which Jenny Randles wrote with a co-author named Paul Whetnall in 1981. Randles would later in the 1990's write another book with the same title, functioning as an overall intro to the abductee/contactee subculture rather than focusing on the Sunderland case as this one does. The two books are however listed as different issues of the same book here on GoodReads. Cue the confusion.
As far as I can tell, this is one of the very first full-length books that British ufologist Jenny Randles wrote after writing articles for the magazine Flying Saucer Review on a regular basis through the 1970's. The book revolves around one of the strangest contactee cases in British ufological history: The Sunderland family in Merseyside, whose children each had several encounters with alleged extraterrestrials in mid-1970's.
All of the incidents throughout case were highly strange, including such things as: Multiple alien races, some of whom looked perfectly human if not resembling any modern ethnic group, others not so much; one of the children being shown an alien zoo aboard a spaceship containing various strange creatures explained to be domesticated animals from different exoplanets, some of whom had escaped from captivity during previous visits to Earth inspiring several cryptid stories in the process; poltergeist activity afflicting the family; telepathic contact with the extraterrestrials; representatives of one of the more human-looking alien races explaining that they are descendants of a now-forgotten technologically advanced human civilisation that existed on Earth in its past, but later left for outer space - who had by now returned to their ancestral planet.
One of the Sunderland children later had another strange experience, a dream about being an Iron Age Celtic ancestor who encountered the first Romans to set foot in Britain. Ancestral memory at work? Either way the family seems to have been a magnet for weird things going on.
As you can imagine, when Randles and Whetnall get around to analysing the Sunderland case they are obviously confused about exactly what to make of it. The case does not fit into the favoured narratives of any ideological "camp" within ufology... with the possible exception of people like John Keel, Whitley Strieber and Jacques Vallée who believe the so-called aliens are in fact supernatural shapeshifters who present themselves as stereotypical extraterrestrial visitors out of Hollywood science-fiction movies just like they in the past masqueraded as gods, angels, demons, fairies and so on. Notice that both Keel and Vallée are included in the thanks list at the beginning, and reading one of Randles' books (can't remember if it was this one) is what later inspired Strieber to go public about his experiences with the "Visitors". Randles and Whetnall also end up considering Freudian and Jungian analysis of dreams, or the Tibetan Buddhist idea of the "tulpa" namely a being that comes into existence because of human belief in them, or that the entities the Sunderlands encountered may indeed be real extraterrestrials but who do not tell their human contactees the whole truth of their identity and intentions. This is an idea Randles would later run with in her future book "Abduction".
I imagine this book did not sell many copies. That would explain Randles later writing a completely different book with the same title, presumably because it would not cause much confusion. Considering how weird the Sunderland case is, I can understand why so many ufologists would not even touch it. Conversely, this means that anyone with an interest in the weirder corners of ufology especially as far as the UK is concerned ought to see if they can find a copy.
As far as I can tell, this is one of the very first full-length books that British ufologist Jenny Randles wrote after writing articles for the magazine Flying Saucer Review on a regular basis through the 1970's. The book revolves around one of the strangest contactee cases in British ufological history: The Sunderland family in Merseyside, whose children each had several encounters with alleged extraterrestrials in mid-1970's.
All of the incidents throughout case were highly strange, including such things as: Multiple alien races, some of whom looked perfectly human if not resembling any modern ethnic group, others not so much; one of the children being shown an alien zoo aboard a spaceship containing various strange creatures explained to be domesticated animals from different exoplanets, some of whom had escaped from captivity during previous visits to Earth inspiring several cryptid stories in the process; poltergeist activity afflicting the family; telepathic contact with the extraterrestrials; representatives of one of the more human-looking alien races explaining that they are descendants of a now-forgotten technologically advanced human civilisation that existed on Earth in its past, but later left for outer space - who had by now returned to their ancestral planet.
One of the Sunderland children later had another strange experience, a dream about being an Iron Age Celtic ancestor who encountered the first Romans to set foot in Britain. Ancestral memory at work? Either way the family seems to have been a magnet for weird things going on.
As you can imagine, when Randles and Whetnall get around to analysing the Sunderland case they are obviously confused about exactly what to make of it. The case does not fit into the favoured narratives of any ideological "camp" within ufology... with the possible exception of people like John Keel, Whitley Strieber and Jacques Vallée who believe the so-called aliens are in fact supernatural shapeshifters who present themselves as stereotypical extraterrestrial visitors out of Hollywood science-fiction movies just like they in the past masqueraded as gods, angels, demons, fairies and so on. Notice that both Keel and Vallée are included in the thanks list at the beginning, and reading one of Randles' books (can't remember if it was this one) is what later inspired Strieber to go public about his experiences with the "Visitors". Randles and Whetnall also end up considering Freudian and Jungian analysis of dreams, or the Tibetan Buddhist idea of the "tulpa" namely a being that comes into existence because of human belief in them, or that the entities the Sunderlands encountered may indeed be real extraterrestrials but who do not tell their human contactees the whole truth of their identity and intentions. This is an idea Randles would later run with in her future book "Abduction".
I imagine this book did not sell many copies. That would explain Randles later writing a completely different book with the same title, presumably because it would not cause much confusion. Considering how weird the Sunderland case is, I can understand why so many ufologists would not even touch it. Conversely, this means that anyone with an interest in the weirder corners of ufology especially as far as the UK is concerned ought to see if they can find a copy.
January 13, 2021
This book was very informative for my research, laying out big or important events for every year from 1947-1997 in a timeline that was well organized. With the exception of many typos and repeated words (a result of poor editing), Jenny Randles has put together a much-needed book in the community of UFOlogy for those of us who are only skimming the edges. I hope she does another one for the years 1997 until present. Well done!
June 28, 2022
My ratings of books on Goodreads are solely a crude ranking of their utility to me, and not an evaluation of literary merit, entertainment value, social importance, humor, insightfulness, scientific accuracy, creative vigor, suspensefulness of plot, depth of characters, vitality of theme, excitement of climax, satisfaction of ending, or any other combination of dimensions of value which we are expected to boil down through some fabulous alchemy into a single digit.
March 17, 2024
This book by Jenny Randles doesn't really bring many things to the table, she did write all these cases somewhere else, nothing of real interest here, if you want to buy it as a gift for a friend or to leave at a table so people pick up to look at the images, then ok, in terms of information, not really good.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews