Patrick Harpur

A sincere and sometimes interesting effort to make sense of ghost/Bigfoot/UFO sightings, religious visions, et sic porro. However, it should give the reader pause when the wordy, rambling synopsis on the back cover isn't actually a synopsis: when it avoids a clear description of the book's content in favor of gobbledygook about "venerable traditions" and "neglected worldviews." Such is the case here.

To get down to the nitty-gritty, Harpur applies psychologist Carl Jung's interpretation of unidentified flying objects to a broader range of supernatural sightings. Jung noted that many UFO sightings "seemed to be of solid objects--which, moreover, registered on radar screens," writes Harpur. "(Jung) thought it possible that projections from the collective unconscious might have a physical aspect; or else, although UFOs might be physical, they were not necessarily extraterrestrial spacecraft." See what he did there? It's okay to talk about flying saucers (and ghosts, and Bigfoot) as long as you proceed from the premise that they simply can't be what the average goofball thinks they are. Coat the subject with an academic gloss (unidentified flying objects "symbolize the disintegration of psychic unity by arriving in numbers and in a multitude of shapes") and suddenly it's respectable. Whew! Problem solved.

Sheer intellectual snobbery. It may not be deliberate, but it stinks as unmistakably as any form of snobbery does. And it reaches absurd depths when, after describing a fascinating series of unexplained big cat sightings, the author concludes that it is "tempting" to see them as "a return of wild instinctual life" to the commuterized suburbs--a "fanged unconscious force which menaces the bland surface of stockbroker-belt consciousness." Tempting it may be, at least to an academic ninny; convincing it is not. In 2005, a spate of big cat sightings occurred in my hometown; interestingly, they were confined to a single neighborhood not far from where I was living at the time. This was an area of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century houses on quiet, tree-lined streets, a setting which surely would have put a damper on Harpur's fantasies about archetypal forces bursting forth from the collective unconscious to menace complacent stockbrokers. (Or whatever.)

I don't want to judge the author too harshly. As I've said, he appears to be sincerely interested in the subject (see his description of Roy Fulton's eerie 1979 encounter with a vanishing hitchhiker), and there's room for multiple theories about the paranormal. I just think that he's essentially barking up the wrong tree. Paul Devereux's Haunted Land: Investigations into Ancient Mysteries is a better, more clearly stated book in this vein.… (mais)