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Beyond Earth: Man's Contact With UFOs
Beyond Man's Contact With Ufos
Paperback
First published January 1, 1974
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About the author
Ralph H. Blum
34 books37 followersRalph Blum (5/1932-) is a writer and cultural anthropologist who has been working with the Runes as a tool for self-counselling since 1977.
One of three children born to silent film star, Carmel Myers, during her second marriage to husband Ralph Henriques Blum, Sr. (1893-1950) (Her first marriage was to Isidore Kornblum, which ended in divorce in 1923). Ralph Blum (Jr.), was also the nephew of Hollywood writer and director, Zion Myers, Carmel's older brother.
Blum studied at Harvard University (1950-1957). During this time, he also spent a period of time in Italy as a Fulbright Scholar, returned to Harvard, where he did graduate work in anthropology with grants from the National Science Foundation and the Ford Foundation, and finally earning a BA in Russian Studies and Anthropology, graduating Phi Beta Kappa.
He later studied Soviet Cinema at Leningrad University from 1961-1963. His reporting from the Soviet Union, the first of its kind for The New Yorker (1961-1965), included two three-part series on Russian cultural life.
In 1982, the modern usage of the runes for answering life's questions was apparently originated by Ralph Blum in his divination book The Book of Runes: A Handbook for the Use of an Ancient Oracle, which was marketed with a small bag of round tiles with runes stamped on them. This book has remained in print since its first publication. The sources for Blum's divinatory interpretations, as he explained in The Book of Runes itself, drew heavily on then-current books describing the ancient I Ching divination system of China.
Each of Blum's seven books on runic divination deals with a specialized area of life or a varied technique for reading runes:
The Book of Runes: A Handbook for the Use of an Ancient Oracle: The Viking Runes (1982); revised 10th Anniversary Edition (1992); revised 25th Anniversary Edition (2007).
The Rune Cards: Sacred Play for Self Discovery (1989); reissued as The Rune Cards: Ancient Wisdom For the New Millennium (1997). Rather than rune stones, this book uses images of the runes printed on card stock, much like a set of trading cards or tarot cards.
The Healing Runes with co-author Susan Loughan (1995) teaches methods for using runic divination in the context of health and personal integration.
Rune Play: A Method of Self Counseling and a Year-Round Rune Casting Recordbook (1996)
The Serenity Runes: Five Keys to the Serenity Prayer with co-author Susan Loughan (1998); reissued as The Serenity Runes: Five Keys to Spiritual Recovery (2005) utilizes runic divination as a method for assisting self-help and recovery from addictions; the title is a reference to the well-known serenity prayer widely used in the 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Ralph H. Blum's Little Book of Runic Wisdom (2002).
The Relationship Runes: A Compass for the Heart with co-author Bronwyn Jones (2003) shows how to use runic divination in matters of love and friendship.
Blum has also written books on the Tao Te Ching, Zen Buddhism, and UFOs. His work has also been published in Readers Digest, Cosmopolitan, Vogue, Saturday Evening Post, and Western Horseman. Blum also published three novels: The Simultaneous Man (1970), Old Glory and the Real-Time Freaks (1972), and The Foreigner. Both The Simultaneous Man and Old Glory... reflect his involvement in early drug research.
Recently, Blum won the Nautilus Book Award Medal for Investigative Reporting for his latest book, written in collaboration with oncologist Mark Scholz, MD, Invasion of the Prostate Snatchers. He has been living with prostate cancer, without radical intervention, for twenty years.
Ralph Blum currently resides in Los Angeles, CA and on Ikaria Island, Greece with his wife Jeanne Elizabeth Blum, an author in her own right, best known for her book Woman
One of three children born to silent film star, Carmel Myers, during her second marriage to husband Ralph Henriques Blum, Sr. (1893-1950) (Her first marriage was to Isidore Kornblum, which ended in divorce in 1923). Ralph Blum (Jr.), was also the nephew of Hollywood writer and director, Zion Myers, Carmel's older brother.
Blum studied at Harvard University (1950-1957). During this time, he also spent a period of time in Italy as a Fulbright Scholar, returned to Harvard, where he did graduate work in anthropology with grants from the National Science Foundation and the Ford Foundation, and finally earning a BA in Russian Studies and Anthropology, graduating Phi Beta Kappa.
He later studied Soviet Cinema at Leningrad University from 1961-1963. His reporting from the Soviet Union, the first of its kind for The New Yorker (1961-1965), included two three-part series on Russian cultural life.
In 1982, the modern usage of the runes for answering life's questions was apparently originated by Ralph Blum in his divination book The Book of Runes: A Handbook for the Use of an Ancient Oracle, which was marketed with a small bag of round tiles with runes stamped on them. This book has remained in print since its first publication. The sources for Blum's divinatory interpretations, as he explained in The Book of Runes itself, drew heavily on then-current books describing the ancient I Ching divination system of China.
Each of Blum's seven books on runic divination deals with a specialized area of life or a varied technique for reading runes:
The Book of Runes: A Handbook for the Use of an Ancient Oracle: The Viking Runes (1982); revised 10th Anniversary Edition (1992); revised 25th Anniversary Edition (2007).
The Rune Cards: Sacred Play for Self Discovery (1989); reissued as The Rune Cards: Ancient Wisdom For the New Millennium (1997). Rather than rune stones, this book uses images of the runes printed on card stock, much like a set of trading cards or tarot cards.
The Healing Runes with co-author Susan Loughan (1995) teaches methods for using runic divination in the context of health and personal integration.
Rune Play: A Method of Self Counseling and a Year-Round Rune Casting Recordbook (1996)
The Serenity Runes: Five Keys to the Serenity Prayer with co-author Susan Loughan (1998); reissued as The Serenity Runes: Five Keys to Spiritual Recovery (2005) utilizes runic divination as a method for assisting self-help and recovery from addictions; the title is a reference to the well-known serenity prayer widely used in the 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Ralph H. Blum's Little Book of Runic Wisdom (2002).
The Relationship Runes: A Compass for the Heart with co-author Bronwyn Jones (2003) shows how to use runic divination in matters of love and friendship.
Blum has also written books on the Tao Te Ching, Zen Buddhism, and UFOs. His work has also been published in Readers Digest, Cosmopolitan, Vogue, Saturday Evening Post, and Western Horseman. Blum also published three novels: The Simultaneous Man (1970), Old Glory and the Real-Time Freaks (1972), and The Foreigner. Both The Simultaneous Man and Old Glory... reflect his involvement in early drug research.
Recently, Blum won the Nautilus Book Award Medal for Investigative Reporting for his latest book, written in collaboration with oncologist Mark Scholz, MD, Invasion of the Prostate Snatchers. He has been living with prostate cancer, without radical intervention, for twenty years.
Ralph Blum currently resides in Los Angeles, CA and on Ikaria Island, Greece with his wife Jeanne Elizabeth Blum, an author in her own right, best known for her book Woman
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
May 6, 2019
First things first. I think that it might be a good idea for me to just write a standard, reusable paragraph that I can use every time I review a book that covers anything that might fall into the realm of the paranormal. It should go something like this: I was a precocious reader as a child, and I was particularly interested in comics and science-fiction and horror. Those preoccupations in turn fueled an obsession with “real-life” curiosities, such as UFOs and Bigfoot and other such esoterica as might fall into the realm of the unusual or occult. Those subjects still interest me to this day, although I have been trained in the sciences and as such take on the viewpoint of the educated skeptic with a scientific worldview. (Thank you, Scooby-Doo, for introducing me to the concept of rationalism, a mighty achievement for a Saturday morning cartoon show.)
All that said, I do take a position that as humans we are limited by what our senses and experiences can tell us about the world around us. Science expands because we ask questions and seek answers. New data comes in all the time that causes science to adapt and revise suppositions and theories. I always like to say that if some dude drives up to a research station tomorrow with a Bigfoot carcass in the back of his pickup truck, well then, science will just have to examine the new data and react accordingly. We can only progress by thinking the impossible all the while working within the possible. When it comes to the paranormal, Carl Sagan said it the best: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But even as a skeptic I would say, if the evidence is out there…..BRING IT ON!!
Thus I still collect and read books like “Beyond Earth: Man’s Contact With UFOs,” a 1974 examination of the subject written by Ralph and Judy Blum. I’ll say right off of the bat that “Beyond Earth” is a much better book than it needed to be, a reasonably sober and skeptical look at the UFO Phenomenon (capital P supplied by the authors). I actually owned a copy of this book when I was much younger, but I don’t have a good memory of reading the text. I managed to find a decent copy on Abebooks for a few bucks and snapped it up when I recognized the cover illustration. The book uses a widely reported UFO encounter case from 1973 involving two shipyard workers from Pascagoula, Mississippi as its main continuity thread, repeatedly coming back to the incident and using it to tie the narrative together. Along the way, the Blums touch on other encounters and historical analyses of the Phenomenon in an attempt to bring some light to a subject that by 1974 had become both newsworthy and tiresome at the same time.
In an autobiographical side note, I clearly remember the Pascagoula case being sensational enough to make my local evening news even in Texarkana, Texas. Two shipyard workers, Charles Hickman and Calvin Parker, had been fishing off of a pier on the Pascagoula River one evening, when they were approached by a glowing blue UFO floating over the water. Parker panicked and passed out, but Hickson claimed that he was taken aboard the UFO and examined by the occupants. He was then released and taken back to shore, where he and Parker discussed the incident and decided to report it to the local police. The story gained national traction and made headlines everywhere. Both men went through extensive examinations and interviews and even polygraph tests. It was clear that Hickson and Parker had experienced SOMETHING, but the true nature of that something would never become entirely clear. By the time that Charles Hickson appeared on the Dick Cavett show, his story had been picked apart by sober-minded scientists like Carl Sagan, who basically put the entire Phenomenon down to some sort of national mass hysteria that could be easily explained by normal events.
There were, of course, a few actual scientists still trying to define and categorize the Phenomenon even as late as 1974. The Air Force and other government agencies had officially washed their hands of the UFO question by early 1969, after the Condon Report was published and given to a questioning public. The University of Colorado-based Condon Committee was tasked with analyzing a number of UFO reports from the official Air Force Blue Book. It was supposed to be a fair and unbiased examination of the UFO question, but it turned out to be mostly a sham, meant to alleviate the Air Force of continuing to use resources to research incidents. The Condon Report was meant to bury the question of UFOs in the public sphere, but it only ended up confusing the situation even more in the mind of John Q. Everyman. It did, however, achieve its main function, that of getting the government out of the UFO business once and for all, at least as far as the general public was concerned.
What was left of research in the wake of the Condon Report was a number of amateur organizations such as NICAP and MUFON, run by good people on meager resources and with no real connective tissue or common goal other than to document what people were seeing in the skies. All of this history is stated pretty clearly within the pages of “Beyond Earth,” and it’s part of why it ends up being a decent book on the subject. The text isn’t stuck on any one theory of what the Phenomenon might be. The Blums acknowledge the extraterrestrial hypothesis, but are also clear to point out that there are other ideas that might explain UFOs, from Jung’s hypothesis of the collective unconscious, all the way to John Keel’s proposition of a shared interdimensional space. It’s that willingness to be open minded that keeps “Beyond Earth” grounded and serious in its tone and execution. It doesn’t hurt that the Blums are pretty good writers, and using the Pascagoula case as a repeated narrative touchstone is a very smart tactic.
I said it before but I’ll state it again for the record: this is a much better book than it had to be given that it was released during the height of the “occult wave” of the early-to-mid Sensational Seventies. UFO books littered the shelves back then, along with other books on all sorts of paranormal topics. Most of those books were badly written dreck, published in a hurry in order to capitalize on the public furor surrounding occult topics. “Beyond Earth” is a far better read than most of those forgotten volumes, and you’d do well to seek this book out if you have any sort of a historical interest in the Phenomenon.
The UFO topic still fascinates me to this day, though I am more inclined now to take on the viewpoint of Jacques Vallee in his book “Passport to Magonia.” Clearly SOMETHING is going on, and has been going on for quite some time in this long story of mankind. Reports of angels and demons and leprechauns have given way to a technological age of space men and mechanical ships from outer space, but it is also clear that sober and sound-minded people continue to have experiences that cannot be explained through rational means. As of yet. The UFO question, like all paranormal subjects, does not lend itself well to the strict doctrines of science. And yet science is the only way that we will ever get answers to these subjects. That requires money and time and resources that no one seems to be willing to spend, and so we will continue to relegate the Phenomenon to the back pages of murky esotericism for the time being.
But that doesn’t stop me from looking up into the skies….always hoping for that glimpse of the unknown. Go read this book and join me in a watch party sometime. It’ll be fun, I promise.
All that said, I do take a position that as humans we are limited by what our senses and experiences can tell us about the world around us. Science expands because we ask questions and seek answers. New data comes in all the time that causes science to adapt and revise suppositions and theories. I always like to say that if some dude drives up to a research station tomorrow with a Bigfoot carcass in the back of his pickup truck, well then, science will just have to examine the new data and react accordingly. We can only progress by thinking the impossible all the while working within the possible. When it comes to the paranormal, Carl Sagan said it the best: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But even as a skeptic I would say, if the evidence is out there…..BRING IT ON!!
Thus I still collect and read books like “Beyond Earth: Man’s Contact With UFOs,” a 1974 examination of the subject written by Ralph and Judy Blum. I’ll say right off of the bat that “Beyond Earth” is a much better book than it needed to be, a reasonably sober and skeptical look at the UFO Phenomenon (capital P supplied by the authors). I actually owned a copy of this book when I was much younger, but I don’t have a good memory of reading the text. I managed to find a decent copy on Abebooks for a few bucks and snapped it up when I recognized the cover illustration. The book uses a widely reported UFO encounter case from 1973 involving two shipyard workers from Pascagoula, Mississippi as its main continuity thread, repeatedly coming back to the incident and using it to tie the narrative together. Along the way, the Blums touch on other encounters and historical analyses of the Phenomenon in an attempt to bring some light to a subject that by 1974 had become both newsworthy and tiresome at the same time.
In an autobiographical side note, I clearly remember the Pascagoula case being sensational enough to make my local evening news even in Texarkana, Texas. Two shipyard workers, Charles Hickman and Calvin Parker, had been fishing off of a pier on the Pascagoula River one evening, when they were approached by a glowing blue UFO floating over the water. Parker panicked and passed out, but Hickson claimed that he was taken aboard the UFO and examined by the occupants. He was then released and taken back to shore, where he and Parker discussed the incident and decided to report it to the local police. The story gained national traction and made headlines everywhere. Both men went through extensive examinations and interviews and even polygraph tests. It was clear that Hickson and Parker had experienced SOMETHING, but the true nature of that something would never become entirely clear. By the time that Charles Hickson appeared on the Dick Cavett show, his story had been picked apart by sober-minded scientists like Carl Sagan, who basically put the entire Phenomenon down to some sort of national mass hysteria that could be easily explained by normal events.
There were, of course, a few actual scientists still trying to define and categorize the Phenomenon even as late as 1974. The Air Force and other government agencies had officially washed their hands of the UFO question by early 1969, after the Condon Report was published and given to a questioning public. The University of Colorado-based Condon Committee was tasked with analyzing a number of UFO reports from the official Air Force Blue Book. It was supposed to be a fair and unbiased examination of the UFO question, but it turned out to be mostly a sham, meant to alleviate the Air Force of continuing to use resources to research incidents. The Condon Report was meant to bury the question of UFOs in the public sphere, but it only ended up confusing the situation even more in the mind of John Q. Everyman. It did, however, achieve its main function, that of getting the government out of the UFO business once and for all, at least as far as the general public was concerned.
What was left of research in the wake of the Condon Report was a number of amateur organizations such as NICAP and MUFON, run by good people on meager resources and with no real connective tissue or common goal other than to document what people were seeing in the skies. All of this history is stated pretty clearly within the pages of “Beyond Earth,” and it’s part of why it ends up being a decent book on the subject. The text isn’t stuck on any one theory of what the Phenomenon might be. The Blums acknowledge the extraterrestrial hypothesis, but are also clear to point out that there are other ideas that might explain UFOs, from Jung’s hypothesis of the collective unconscious, all the way to John Keel’s proposition of a shared interdimensional space. It’s that willingness to be open minded that keeps “Beyond Earth” grounded and serious in its tone and execution. It doesn’t hurt that the Blums are pretty good writers, and using the Pascagoula case as a repeated narrative touchstone is a very smart tactic.
I said it before but I’ll state it again for the record: this is a much better book than it had to be given that it was released during the height of the “occult wave” of the early-to-mid Sensational Seventies. UFO books littered the shelves back then, along with other books on all sorts of paranormal topics. Most of those books were badly written dreck, published in a hurry in order to capitalize on the public furor surrounding occult topics. “Beyond Earth” is a far better read than most of those forgotten volumes, and you’d do well to seek this book out if you have any sort of a historical interest in the Phenomenon.
The UFO topic still fascinates me to this day, though I am more inclined now to take on the viewpoint of Jacques Vallee in his book “Passport to Magonia.” Clearly SOMETHING is going on, and has been going on for quite some time in this long story of mankind. Reports of angels and demons and leprechauns have given way to a technological age of space men and mechanical ships from outer space, but it is also clear that sober and sound-minded people continue to have experiences that cannot be explained through rational means. As of yet. The UFO question, like all paranormal subjects, does not lend itself well to the strict doctrines of science. And yet science is the only way that we will ever get answers to these subjects. That requires money and time and resources that no one seems to be willing to spend, and so we will continue to relegate the Phenomenon to the back pages of murky esotericism for the time being.
But that doesn’t stop me from looking up into the skies….always hoping for that glimpse of the unknown. Go read this book and join me in a watch party sometime. It’ll be fun, I promise.
December 6, 2014
I read this book when I was twelve. Oddly enough, it was on my father's bookshelf. It's only just today, picking it up from my own bookshelf, that I noticed a tiny label on the inside of the cover showing that he acquired it on a business trip to San Francisco in the mid-1970s.
Looking through this book for the first time in decades, I realised that this is a fantastic historical document. The authors have looked quite dispassionately at a huge range of sources of first-hand experiences with UFOs (a designation I always find awkward - they're 'unidentified', they're in the air, and they are objects). They've interviewed witnesses, looked at scenes and consulted experts.
An historian will probably find that it says a great deal about who we were in the early 70s in terms of our culture and beliefs. The authors are wise enough to reference Jung in their last few pages, and the mull over his theory that mankind could unconsciously project these phenomena. Coincidentally, I saw a documentary last night on funk music, and a lot of UFO and Ancient Egyptian imagery was adopted at that time. We believe what we want to believe, when we need to believe it. When I read it I was pretty convinced that aliens were visiting us. Now I believe that, if they are, they wouldn't be doing all the stupid stuff outlined in this book. Why would they? It's a question the authors ask.
Looking through this book for the first time in decades, I realised that this is a fantastic historical document. The authors have looked quite dispassionately at a huge range of sources of first-hand experiences with UFOs (a designation I always find awkward - they're 'unidentified', they're in the air, and they are objects). They've interviewed witnesses, looked at scenes and consulted experts.
An historian will probably find that it says a great deal about who we were in the early 70s in terms of our culture and beliefs. The authors are wise enough to reference Jung in their last few pages, and the mull over his theory that mankind could unconsciously project these phenomena. Coincidentally, I saw a documentary last night on funk music, and a lot of UFO and Ancient Egyptian imagery was adopted at that time. We believe what we want to believe, when we need to believe it. When I read it I was pretty convinced that aliens were visiting us. Now I believe that, if they are, they wouldn't be doing all the stupid stuff outlined in this book. Why would they? It's a question the authors ask.
November 27, 2020
For sure one of best and most detailed books written about UFOs I've ever read!! So happy found it for awesome price.
January 6, 2018
This was written a lot more professionally than I expected, and contained a lot of interesting information that I was previously unfamiliar with. It wasn't flawless, though, and sometimes the writing didn't really go anywhere or unnecessarily repeated itself. The most useful part, though, is the extended bibliography at the end, listing several pages of other presumably reliable text resources about various UFO sightings. I'm going to recommend this book to several other people, but I'll have to make sure that everyone I recommend it to realizes that the book is by no means the last word on UFO anything and definitely has some flaws. But for what it is, it's pretty good.
May 25, 2009
i really enjoyed this book. it has photographs and stories reprinted from newspaper articles along with personal interviews. it complements other books i have read on the subject of ufo's and ufology.
Well worth the time to read!
Well worth the time to read!
May 24, 2024
I received this for Christmas. To be fair I was too young to really get into it, but I hold fond memories.
December 27, 2025
not an unbiased approach and a little dull, but the carl sagan slander made me laugh
April 6, 2012
This is bout a young man that is taken from his village and made into an immortal. His adventures run from good to evil. It is not the kind of book I usually read so I did not enjoy it as much as someone else may.
Want to read
May 18, 2014may be this book is good
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews