Sean Casteel and Tim R. Swartz (editors). Alien Artifacts, Zontar Press, 2022.
This is the first book to be produced by Casteel and Swartz in the wake of Timothy Green Beckley’s unexpected death last year. Like Beckley’s seemingly endless stream of books and publications this volume is a flamboyant mixture of outrageous UFO rumours and stories mixed with a few sober observations about what the blurb on the front cover states is the ‘Incredible Evidence of Exotic Material from UFO Encounters.’
This evidence ranges from people who are scarred by UFO vehicles like Stefan Michalak, who suffered a grid of burns on his chest; the unappetising pancakes given to Joe Simonton by aliens, and old favourites like the crashed UFO debris from an exploding UFO at Ubatuba, Brazil, falls of angel hair (what happened to them?), crashed UFO wreckage, ancient artifacts attributed to aliens. It includes implants suffered by abductees recovered mainly by the late Dr Roger Leir, alien DNA and even two gloves found near some unusual wreckage in the Arizona desert. For good measure, Tim Swartz writes about alien viruses and bacteria, and notes that people who touched or who got near the strange creatures seen in Varginha, Brazil, in 1996, suffered from mystery illnesses and some even died.
The gloves got lost, and the story is very similar regarding other alien evidence. Implants once removed dissolve, angel hair likewise dissolves, wreckage and crashed saucers languish in very remote almost inaccessible places or what is recovered turns out to be very unconvincing when scientifically analysed. Simonton’s pancakes were found to be made of mundane earthly ingredients and might well have been integrated into a realistic dream or a hoax. One alleged alien artifact in the very last chapter of the book is revealed to be a prop from the TV show Roswell.
There is an entertaining chapter that consists of a Q and A between Tim Beckley and Ted Phillips who was Director for the Center for Physical Trace Research, and often worked with Dr. Hynek. They talk about the Socorro landing case and Phillips disagrees with the ‘uneducated ideas’ that try to explain it. He regards it as ‘a complex case’ with some physical evidence. He mainly talks about UAPs in Marley Woods (a Skinwalker Ranch type hotspot) and about a cave in Eastern Europe where a huge alien artefact (spaceship?) was discovered in WWII. The following chapter contains a lecture by Phillips and his fruitless attempts at finding it. Perhaps the new crop of UAP researchers will take a crack at it!
I contributed two chapters to this volume. The first looks at the phantom airship close encounter story given by Charles Lethbridge in 1909 that was backed up by a long groove in the ground and a litter of newspaper clippings about aircraft and warfare, and a small pin attached to a label. Was this a hoax to support the idea that Britain was in danger from invading German airships or as some think an early CE3K? My other chapter is about the alien egg given by John Lennon to Uri Geller, a case that is much easier to crack as it was probably a joke.
Good solid evidence with a convincing providence has so far remained elusive, and that is why nuts and bolts ufology has yet to convince anyone but the believers who hang on to any scrap of evidence. Alien Artifacts therefore serves as a useful guide to the range of such evidence and the theories surrounding the subject.
